What Is Kali Puja? The Dark Mother, the Night of Ghosts and Bengal’s Diwali

Kali Puja is Bengal’s festival of the goddess Kali, traditionally celebrated around midnight on the new-moon night of Diwali. While much of India lights lamps for the goddess Lakshmi and the god Ram coming home, Bengal worships Maa Kali, the Dark Mother. And the night before, on Bhoot Chaturdashi, it lights fourteen lamps for its dead. This year Bhoot Chaturdashi falls on Saturday 7 November, and Kali Puja and Diwali on Sunday 8 November.

If you’re reading this in Britain, you’ve had quite a fortnight. Halloween was a week ago, and the sky was full of fireworks for Bonfire Night on Thursday. Bengal is about to do both at once: a night of ghosts, then a night of fireworks for a goddess who wears a garland of heads.

This is the last of three posts. In Part 1, I wrote about Mahalaya, the dawn that opens the season. In Part 2, I wrote about Durga Puja, when Maa comes home. This is how the season ends.

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Diwali: Ram Comes Home

Part 2 ended on the eve of a war. Ram had woken the goddess out of season, nearly given his eye for her blessing, and gone to fight Ravan for Sita.

He wins. And after fourteen years in exile, he goes home to Ayodhya with Sita. It is the darkest night of the month, a new moon, so the people of Ayodhya light rows of lamps to guide him home. That, in the most widely told version, is Diwali: the festival of lights, for a homecoming.

Across much of India today, the evening of Diwali belongs to Lakshmi, goddess of fortune. Homes are cleaned, doors are left open and lamps are lit so that she’ll come in.

Bengal does things differently. We worshipped Lakshmi a fortnight ago, on Kojagari Purnima, the full moon after Durga Puja. So on the new moon of Diwali, while many other parts of India welcome the goddess of fortune, Bengal stays up until midnight for a very different goddess.

Bhoot Chaturdashi: Bengal’s Night of Ghosts

But first, the night before. Bhoot means ghost; Chaturdashi means the fourteenth day of the lunar fortnight. Put together, it’s the Fourteenth Night of Ghosts, and people sometimes call it the Bengali Halloween. The comparison is useful, but the customs have their own history; I explored that wider theme in Halloween traditions around the world.

On this night, the belief goes, the dead come home. Specifically, fourteen generations of your ancestors, your choddo purush, return to visit the family. So at dusk, Bengali households light fourteen small clay lamps, the choddo prodip, and set them at the doorways and in the darkest corners of the house. The light shows the ancestors the way in. It also keeps out the other kind of spirit, the ones who aren’t family and aren’t welcome.

The same number turns up at lunch. Families eat choddo shaak, a dish of fourteen different leafy greens, cooked and eaten with rice. The old belief is that no evil spirit can live in a body that has eaten them.

There’s a second version of the story, too. Some say the fourteen lamps are for Chamunda, one of Kali’s fiercest forms, who comes with fourteen spirits of her own to drive the wandering ghosts away. Either way, the lamps are lit the night before Kali comes.

If you’re keeping count, this series began and ends with the dead. On Mahalaya, Bengal offers water to its ancestors and the fortnight of the dead comes to a close. On Bhoot Chaturdashi, they come back to visit, and we light their way.

Who Is Kali? Maa, Not Monster

If you’ve seen one picture of a Hindu goddess and found it frightening, it was probably Kali.

She is dark-skinned, almost black or deep blue. Her hair is loose and wild. She wears a garland of severed heads and a skirt of severed arms. In one hand she holds a sword, in another a freshly cut head. Her tongue, bright red, hangs out of her mouth. And she stands with one foot on the chest of a man lying on the ground, who turns out to be her husband, the god Shiva.

Western books have often called her the goddess of death and destruction. In Bengal, she’s something else. We call her Maa, Mother, exactly as we call Durga. She is also Shyama, the dark one, and Kali Puja is often called Shyama Puja. Look again at the picture: her other two hands are raised in blessing, one granting wishes and one saying don’t be afraid. She is terrifying, but she’s terrifying on your side.

Where she comes from

One of Kali’s best-known early appearances is in the Devi Mahatmya, the text, usually dated to around the fifth or sixth century, that lies behind the Mahalaya broadcast. Two demon generals, Chanda and Munda, attack the goddess. She becomes so angry that her face turns dark, and out of her forehead springs Kali, gaunt, roaring and armed. She cuts off both generals’ heads and brings them to the goddess, who names her Chamunda: the one who killed Chanda and Munda.

Then comes a worse enemy, Raktabija, whose name means “blood-seed”. Every drop of his blood that touches the ground becomes another demon. Cut him, and you make an army. So Kali spreads out her tongue and drinks his blood before it can fall, until there is nothing left of him. That, more than anything, is why she is drawn with blood on her tongue.

And the foot on Shiva?

That part isn’t in the Devi Mahatmya. It belongs to popular tradition, especially in Bengal and Odisha. The story goes that after the battle, Kali couldn’t stop. She danced on the battlefield and the world began to shake. To calm her, Shiva lay down among the dead in her path. She stepped on him, looked down, saw who it was, and stuck her tongue out in shame. Bengalis still bite their tongue, jibh kata, when they’ve done something embarrassing.

The image has other interpretations too: Kali can represent divine power, and Shiva the stillness beneath it. The popular story about her tongue is one way of reading it, rather than the only explanation.

Why Bengal Worships Kali on Diwali Night

Kali is an ancient goddess, but Bengal’s large public festival developed over centuries. Her worship has deep connections with tantric practice and cremation grounds, alongside the household and temple devotion familiar today.

That changed in Bengal from about the sixteenth or seventeenth century, and the story of how it changed is one of my favourites.

In Nabadwip lived a tantric scholar called Krishnananda Agamavagisha. He wanted to give the formless goddess a form people could worship, but he didn’t know what she should look like. One night, the story goes, she came to him in a dream. Make my image, she told him, in the shape of the first person you see at dawn.

At first light he went out, and the first person he saw was a young village woman, dark-skinned, slapping cow-dung cakes onto a wall to dry. Her hair was loose and her hand was raised. When she noticed a holy man staring at her, she was mortified, and she bit her tongue in embarrassment. Krishnananda went home and made his Kali exactly like that. That figure, Dakshina Kali, is one of the best-known forms of Kali worshipped in Bengal today.

In the eighteenth century, Raja Krishnachandra of Nadia helped popularise Kali worship. By the nineteenth century, Kolkata’s wealthy families were holding them on a grand scale. Then came Ramakrishna, the mystic of the Dakshineswar temple, whose devotion to Kali made her known far beyond Bengal.

The annual festival is held on the autumn new moon, with the main worship traditionally taking place around midnight. A dark goddess, on the darkest night, at the darkest hour. Around her, the city lights every lamp it has and sets off every firecracker it can find.

Today, in parts of Bengal, Kali Puja rivals Durga Puja for size: whole towns build pandals, and the fireworks go on all night.

Kali Puja Celebrations: Lamps, Fireworks and a Long Night

For many families, the evening means lighting lamps, visiting neighbourhood pandals and spending time together. A pandal is a temporary structure built for the goddess and her worshippers. At Kali Puja, the celebration outside and the late-night worship inside run alongside each other.

There is no single way every Bengali household spends the night. Some people fast and wait for the puja; others go out to see the lights and meet friends. The public festival has room for both devotion and an evening out.

The Goddess Who Eats Fish and Meat

In Part 2, I spent a whole section knocking down the idea that Durga Puja is a vegetarian festival. I admitted one exception: the bhog, the food offered to the goddess and shared out, is usually vegetarian.

Kali doesn’t even give you that.

Fish and meat offerings belong to the traditions of several Kali temples in Bengal, including Kalighat and Tarapith. Temple customs are not identical, and neither are the meals Bengali families eat at home.

The tradition even produced one of Bengal’s strangest dishes: niramish mangsho, literally “vegetarian meat”. It’s goat curry cooked without onion or garlic, the way temple food is cooked. The meat is very much meat; it’s the cooking that’s “pure”.

In fairness, not every home is the same. Some Bengali families keep Kali Puja day itself vegetarian, and some women fast until the puja. But a goddess who is offered fish at her own temples is a hard one to recruit for vegetarianism.

Bhai Phonta: One Last Ritual Against Death

The season has one more day. On the second lunar day of the bright fortnight comes Bhai Phonta, Bengal’s version of Bhai Dooj. Sisters place a phonta, a small ritual mark, often made with sandalwood paste, on their brothers’ foreheads, pray for their long life, and then feed them far too many sweets.

The rhyme they recite asks for thorns to be laid at the door of Yama, the god of death, so he can’t come for their brother. So even the last, gentlest ritual of the season is about keeping death outside the house. In 2026, Drik Panchang’s Kolkata calendar lists Bhai Phonta on Wednesday 11 November. Local organisers may hold their celebrations on a different day.

My Thoughts

Writing these three posts, I’ve noticed something I’d never put into words: Bengal’s festival season begins and ends with the dead.

It opens on Mahalaya, a new moon, with water offered to the ancestors at dawn and a radio voice calling Maa home. It ends about a month later on another new moon, with fourteen lamps lit so the ancestors can find their way back. In between, a mother comes home with her children and is sent away again, and a prince goes to war, wins and returns to a city full of lamps.

And at the very end, on the darkest night of the season, Bengal stays up until midnight to worship the most frightening goddess it has, and calls her Mother.

I think that’s the thing about Bengal that I most wanted Western readers to see. We don’t keep the dark at arm’s length. We light a lamp for it, and we invite it in.

So here’s the question I’ll leave you with, now that Halloween is over and the bonfires are out. Who would you light a lamp for?

Shubho Kali Puja. Shubho Dipaboli. And, as the familiar farewell to Maa goes, aasche bocchor abar hobey: next year, it happens again.

Before You Go: Mark Kali Puja and Diwali in the UK

• Light fourteen lamps for Bhoot Chaturdashi. In 2026, the evening falls on Saturday 7 November. Think of whoever you would want to find their way home. Use stable holders, keep flames clear of furnishings, and never leave them unattended; LED candles work for a symbolic display.
• Visit a local celebration. Check Hindu temples and Bengali associations for their own Kali Puja or Diwali programme. Confirm the date and whether visitors need to book. The main Kali Puja worship is traditionally late at night; follow the organisers’ guidance about shoes, photographs and offerings.
• Cook something Bengali. For ideas, The Kolkata Recipe Diary by Sudeepta and Ratna Banerjee brings together recipes from a Bengali home kitchen (Amazon UK).
• Read the source. Kali’s battles appear in chapters 7 and 8 of the Devi Mahatmya. T.B. Coburn’s Encountering the Goddess includes a translation and a study of the text (Amazon UK).
• Plan a future visit to Bengal. Kolkata, Barasat and Naihati are known for their Kali Puja celebrations. Compare flights to Kolkata on Aviasales for a future trip, and check the festival dates for your travel year before booking.
• Read the rest of the series: Part 1: What Is Mahalaya? and Part 2: What Is Durga Puja?.
• Enjoy the darker stories? Get my free horror story, Mam’s Voice, or support Shin Stories.

Sources and Further Reading

• Banglapedia: Kali Puja — forms of Kali and the development of worship in Bengal.
• Kali — an overview of her iconography and the Devi Mahatmya narratives.
• India Currents: Kali’s red tongue — different interpretations of the image.
• Hindu Blog: Krishnananda and Dakshina Kali — the traditional story, rather than a documented eyewitness account.
• Indulge: the fourteen lamps and greens of Bhoot Chaturdashi.
• India Today: fish and meat offerings at Kali temples.
• ThePrint: Kali Puja food traditions.
• Drik Panchang: Kali Puja 2026 in Kolkata and Bengali festival calendar. Dates and ritual times depend on location and calendar tradition.