What Is Durga Puja? The Untimely Awakening Behind Bengal’s Biggest Festival

Durga Puja is the five-day autumn festival in which Bengalis welcome the goddess Durga, Maa Durga, home to earth. In homes, neighbourhoods and vast temporary temples called pandals, people worship her alongside her four children, before sending her back on the final day with music, tears and sweets. This year it begins on Friday 16 October.

It is big. In 2021, UNESCO added Durga Puja in Kolkata to its list of the world’s Intangible Cultural Heritage. But in Bengal we have an old secret about it: by rights, this festival shouldn’t be happening at all.

In Part 1, I wrote about Mahalaya, the dawn when Bengal wakes at four in the morning to hear how Maa Durga defeated a demon no god could kill. This is what comes next: the festival itself, and the story of why it happens in autumn at all.

Why Autumn? The Untimely Awakening

Durga’s proper time is spring. Her worship in the spring, Basanti Puja, still exists, and tradition says it is the original. Autumn is when the goddess is meant to be asleep.

So why does Bengal throw its biggest party for her in October? Because of Ram.

Ram is the hero of the Ramayana, one of the two great epics of India: a prince in exile whose wife, Sita, has been abducted by Ravan, the ten-headed king of Lanka. On the eve of his war to bring her back, Ram knows he can’t win alone. He needs the goddess.

Why her, and not any other god? If you’ve read Part 1, you already know. She is the one who defeated Mahishasura, the demon no god could kill, after the gods had lost heaven for a hundred years. When the odds are impossible, she is the one you call.

And in the Bengali telling, there’s a twist. Ravan was her devotee, and she had been on his side. Before Ram can defeat Ravan, he has to win over Ravan’s goddess.

There is one more problem. She is asleep.

He wakes her anyway. That is the name of the thing: Akal Bodhan, the untimely awakening. Akal means out of season; bodhan means awakening. Ram performs the worship himself, and for it he vows to offer 108 blue lotuses.

The lotuses are gathered and counted. And when the moment comes, one is missing. In many tellings, the goddess has hidden it herself, to test him.

There is no time to find another. But all his life Ram has been called “lotus-eyed”: his eyes, people say, are as beautiful as blue lotuses. So he takes an arrow and turns it towards his own eye, to make up the count.

Before he can do it, she appears. She stops his hand, and she gives him her blessing for the war.

That autumn invocation, a prince waking a goddess out of season and almost giving his eye to do it, is why Bengal worships Durga now. This version of the story isn’t found in the oldest Sanskrit Ramayana. It belongs to Bengal, through the Bengali Ramayana of the poet Krittibas and the tradition around it. Which is fitting, because nobody does Durga Puja like Bengal.

(If you’ve read Part 1, you’ll notice that the story the radio tells on Mahalaya, Durga slaying the buffalo demon Mahishasura, is a different story. That is the battle you see in every Durga statue. Ram’s Akal Bodhan is the reason she comes in autumn. Bengal keeps both.)

Why Five Days? The Five Days of Durga Puja

The festival runs for five days, from Shashthi (the sixth day of the lunar fortnight) to Dashami (the tenth). Western friends sometimes ask why it takes five. Bengal has two answers, and neither of them is “because there’s a lot of ritual”.

The first answer: it’s a visit. Maa isn’t being worshipped for five days in the abstract. She’s a married daughter staying at her mother’s house. She doesn’t come alone: every traditional Bengali Durga stands with her four children, Lakshmi (goddess of fortune), Saraswati (goddess of learning), Ganesha (the elephant-headed remover of obstacles) and Kartikeya (the god of war). She arrives on Shashthi evening, woken in a rite called bodhan, a yearly echo of Ram’s. She stays for the days that follow, and on Dashami she has to go back to her husband on Mount Kailash. So Bengalis count the Puja the way you’d count a beloved relative’s stay: she’s here, she’s still here, she’s leaving tomorrow.

The second answer: it’s a war. In one Bengali account of Akal Bodhan, when Maa appears to Ram she tells him exactly how the battle will go. On Saptami she’ll enter his bow. On Ashtami and Navami his arrows will cut off Ravan’s heads. On Navami afternoon, Ravan will fall. And the tenth day, Dashami, has another name in Bengal: Bijoya, which means victory.

Seen that way, the five days are the war, day by day, ending in victory. It’s also why, on that same tenth day, much of the rest of India celebrates Dussehra by burning giant effigies of Ravan. Bengal marks the same victory by sending its goddess home.

Somewhere between those two answers, at the exact moment Ashtami turns into Navami, comes Sandhi Puja, the most charged ritual of the festival. Priests offer the goddess 108 lamps and 108 lotuses. Yes, 108 lotuses again: Ram’s offering, repeated every year.

And if you ask a Bengali how the five days feel, you’ll get something like this. Shashthi is the arrival, and the excitement that it’s finally happening. Saptami and Ashtami are the peak: new clothes, every pandal, every friend. Navami is the last full night, the one with the biggest feast, and the one nobody wants to end, because everyone knows what tomorrow is. Then Dashami: the farewell.

What It’s Actually Like: New Clothes, Pandals and Friends

I grew up in Asansol and Kulti, the coal-and-steel towns a couple of hundred kilometres west of Kolkata. I’ll be honest: mine wasn’t a religious family. We didn’t do anjali, the morning flower offering to the goddess (Ashtami’s is the one many families never miss). Some rituals of the Puja are only for women, and I’m not a woman. If you think that means I missed out, you’ve misunderstood what Durga Puja is.

For most Bengalis, the Puja is about four things.

New clothes. Everyone gets new clothes for the Puja, ideally a new outfit for every day. Shops spend weeks before it in a frenzy.

Pandal hopping. A pandal is a temporary temple, built for these five days and then taken down. Some are built of bamboo and cloth, some are full-scale replicas of palaces or temples, and some are extraordinary works of art with a theme. Every neighbourhood builds its own and competes to outdo the others. And the whole of Bengal goes out to see them, walking from one to the next until well past midnight and queueing for hours at the famous ones. If you’re British, imagine every Christmas window display in London as a building you could walk into, and the whole city out on the streets all night to see them.

Friends and family. For five days, nobody really works and nobody really sleeps. You see cousins you haven’t seen all year. You walk the streets with friends until three in the morning. It is the whole year’s social life compressed into a week.

Food. Which brings me to the thing I most want to correct.

No, Durga Puja Is Not a Vegetarian Festival

Western friends often assume two things: that Indians are vegetarian, and that a religious festival must mean eating vegetarian. In Bengal, neither is true.

India is not one food culture. Some regions are largely vegetarian; most of the country isn’t. In India’s National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5, 2019–21), 83.4% of men and 70.6% of women aged 15–49 said they eat fish, chicken or meat at least occasionally. In West Bengal, the same survey puts the figure at 98.55%. For Bengalis, meat and fish are not an indulgence. They are home.

And Durga Puja is when we eat most. In my family, the Puja meant mangshor jhol, Bengali goat curry (Bong Eats has a good recipe to follow), the same dish I wrote about for Mahalaya, and in many Bengali homes a mutton curry on Ashtami or Navami is close to compulsory. Then, out on the streets between pandals, there’s:

• Mughlai parota: a flaky flatbread stuffed with egg, and often spiced minced meat, then fried.
• Kolkata Chinese: chilli chicken, chowmein and fried rice, Chinese cooking reinvented by Kolkata’s Chinese community into something that exists nowhere else.
• Kathi rolls: spiced kebab meat wrapped in a paratha, eaten walking.
• Phuchka: crisp hollow puris filled with spiced potato and tamarind water, eaten in one bite at a street stall. Bengal’s answer to everything.
• Luchi with Kashmiri aloor dom: puffed, deep-fried flatbreads with a rich, slow-cooked potato curry.

There is one honest exception. At most community Pujas, the bhog, the food offered to the goddess and then shared out among everyone who comes, is vegetarian, because it’s prepared as a temple offering. It’s usually khichuri (rice and lentils cooked together), labra (a mixed-vegetable dish), chutney and a sweet. It is also, eaten sitting on the floor with a few hundred strangers, one of the best meals of the year.

But the idea that Bengal goes vegetarian for its goddess? She would not recognise it.

Dashami: Maa Goes Home

On the tenth day, the mood changes.

Maa has to go back to Kailash. In the morning, married women bid her farewell with sindoor khela. They touch vermilion to the goddess’s face, then smear it on each other, until everyone is laughing and red. Then the statues are lifted onto trucks and shoulders and carried through the streets, to the beat of the dhak drums, down to the river, where they are immersed. The clay returns to the water it came from.

People cry at the immersion. Not because anything is wrong, but because a daughter is leaving her mother’s house again and won’t be back for a year.

If I had to describe Dashami in one word, it would be bittersweet. As the statues go into the water, the crowd shouts the same line, every year: Aasche bocchor abar hobey! “Next year, it’ll happen again!” It’s a promise to the goddess. It’s also, I think, a way of managing our own expectations: of saying goodbye without letting it hurt too much, because we already know she’ll be back.

Then everyone goes home and starts Bijoya: visiting relatives, touching elders’ feet, hugging friends, wishing each other Shubho Bijoya and eating sweets. If you know New Year’s Day in Scotland, the rounds of visiting and the welcome at every door, you’ll recognise the feeling.

Durga Puja in Manchester

I’ve lived in Manchester for fifteen years, and I’ve been to Durga Puja here every one of them. There are two Pujas in the city, and I usually go for at least two days.

Every night they serve bhog dinner to everyone who comes, and for those few evenings it’s the closest I get to home-cooked Bengali food. Vegetarian, yes, for the reason above. I’m not going to pretend it’s mutton.

And here’s something that might surprise people back home. From a Puja point of view, I sometimes prefer it here. It’s smaller and more community-minded. It’s more disciplined: things start when they say they will. And for an introvert like me, it’s simply nicer. You can talk to people. You can hear yourself think. Back home, Durga Puja is a city-wide tidal wave. Here, it’s a room full of people who have all come a long way to be in it.

But I won’t pretend about everything. The food, the friends, the pandal hopping, the streets at three in the morning: for all of that, nothing comes close to Asansol and Kulti.

My Thoughts

What strikes me most, writing this down for people who’ve never been, is how human the whole thing is.

A prince on the eve of a war he can’t win alone, so desperate for help that he wakes a goddess in the wrong season and nearly gives an eye for it. A mother who comes home once a year with her children, and a city that builds her palaces out of bamboo and cloth and then sends her back to the river, crying. A week of new clothes, mutton curry and walking until dawn, offered up to a goddess who, by every rule, should have been asleep.

Bengal didn’t wait for the right season. It woke her anyway, because it needed her. And every autumn, it still does.

But Ram’s story doesn’t end at the Puja. He goes to war, he wins, and he comes home. Across much of India, his homecoming is lit with lamps, and it becomes Diwali. In Bengal, that dark new-moon night belongs to someone else. The night before, we light fourteen lamps for our dead. On the night itself, we worship Kali. That’s Part 3.

So here’s the question I’ll leave you with. If you had to wake something out of season, because you couldn’t wait for the right time, what would it be?

Shubho Durga Puja. And in a few days, Shubho Bijoya.

Before You Go: How to Go to a Durga Puja in the UK

• Just go. Bengali associations across the UK hold Durga Puja, including two in Manchester, and visitors are welcome. Search “Durga Puja” plus your city.
• A few basics: take your shoes off where others do, dress modestly (bright colours are very welcome), and if you’re offered bhog or sweets, accept them.
• Go in the evening. That’s when the aarti (the lamp ritual), the drums and the food all happen.
• Then find the mutton. A Bengali restaurant, or better, a Bengali friend’s kitchen. To cook it yourself, try the Bong Eats recipe, or The Kolkata Recipe Diary by Sudeepta and Ratna Banerjee, which collects recipes from a Bengali home kitchen (Amazon UK).
• See it in Kolkata. To see Durga Puja where it began, plan ahead for next autumn. Compare flights from London to Kolkata on Aviasales, and book early, because the Puja fortnight is the busiest time of year in the city.
• Part 1: What Is Mahalaya?
• Part 3: Kali Puja, Bhoot Chaturdashi and Diwali comes in early November.
• Support Shin Stories: buymeacoffee.com/shinjanb

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Read next

• What Is Mahalaya? The Bengali Dawn That Begins Durga Puja

Sources

• UNESCO, Durga Puja in Kolkata (inscribed 2021): ich.unesco.org/en/RL/durga-puja-in-kolkata-00703
• Akalabodhana, Wikipedia: meaning of the term, Ram’s worship, the 108 lotuses and the eye, and the Bengali Ramayana account in which Durga had favoured Ravan before shifting her support to Ram. Some tellings make Brahma the officiating priest; this post follows the version in which Ram performs the worship: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akalabodhana
• Hindu Tone, “Sandhi Puja 2026”: 108 lamps and lotuses, timing, and the Krittivasi Ramayana tradition (not Valmiki): hindutone.com/festivals/navratri/sandhi-puja-2026-date-time-108-lamps-kolkata/
• Hindu Blog, the story of the 108 lotus flowers: hindu-blog.com/2026/01/story-of-offering-108-lotus-flowers-to.html
• ThePrint, NFHS-5 national figures (83.4% of men, 70.6% of women eat non-vegetarian food): theprint.in/india/more-jain-men-fewer-jain-women-eating-non-vegetarian-food-reveals-nfhs-5-data/966364/
• AsiaNews, “The myth of vegetarian India” (NFHS-5: 98.55% of West Bengal consumes meat or fish): asianews.it/en/south-asia/india/the-myth-of-vegetarian-india-bengal-introduces-new-state-menu-but-one-in-three-children-is-malnourished
• The Business Standard, “Flavours of Durga Puja” (mutton on Ashtami/Navami, khichuri and labra): tbsnews.net/feature/food/flavours-durga-puja
• Homegrown, “Bhoot Chaturdashi” (fourteen lamps for fourteen generations of ancestors, the night before Kali Puja): homegrown.co.in/homegrown-voices/bhoot-chaturdashi-everything-you-need-to-know-about-bengals-very-own-day-of-the-dead
• Boldsky, October 2026 festival calendar (Shashthi 16 October): boldsky.com/yoga-spirituality/october-2026-festival-calendar-pitru-paksha-ends-navratri-begins-dussehra-follows-173025.html
• Bong Eats, Bengali Mutton Curry: bongeats.com/recipe/bengali-mutton-curry