What Is Mahalaya? The Bengali Dawn That Begins Durga Puja

What is Mahalaya? A Bengali writer explains the pre-dawn radio ritual, the Durga and Mahishasura story, and why this morning opens Durga Puja.

Mahalaya is the new-moon day that opens the season of Durga Puja, Bengal’s biggest festival. Before dawn, Bengalis wake to a radio broadcast that retells the goddess Durga’s battle against the demon Mahishasura. People offer water to their ancestors, and the city starts counting down the days until the goddess comes home.

Durga Puja is big enough that in 2021 UNESCO added Durga Puja in Kolkata to its list of the world’s Intangible Cultural Heritage. Mahalaya is the morning it begins.

That’s the short answer. Here is what it actually feels like.

Four in the Morning

When I was a child in Bengal, Mahalaya meant the alarm going off at four in the morning.

Nobody grumbled. The whole house got up in the dark, and someone switched on the radio, and out came the voice. If you’re Bengali, you already know whose voice I mean. If you aren’t, I’ll come to him in a moment. For now, picture a family sitting half-asleep in a dark room, listening to a man chant in Sanskrit and Bengali while devotional songs rise and fall around him, and the sky outside slowly turning grey.

A Bengali family sitting in a dim living room before dawn, listening to a radio on Mahalaya morning
A Bengali family gathers around the radio before dawn on Mahalaya morning.

From the late nineties onwards there was something new: after the radio, you could switch on the television and watch the whole story performed. Dancers and actors played the gods, the goddess and the demon, and the battle I’d only ever heard was suddenly in front of me.

And then there were the crackers. On Mahalaya morning, before the sun was properly up, we went outside and set off firecrackers, and the whole neighbourhood did the same. The way it was explained to me, the noise drives away evil and clears the way for Devi Paksha, the fortnight of the Goddess, which begins the next day. To a ten-year-old, that was a theological justification for setting things on fire at dawn, and I was not going to argue with it.

After all that, we went to school. Mahalaya wasn’t a day off. So we sat in class with sleepy eyes, buzzing anyway, because everyone knew what the morning meant: Durga Puja was nearly here.

The Voice on the Radio

The broadcast is called Mahishasuramardini, “the Slayer of Mahishasura”. It was put together in the early 1930s at the Calcutta station of what became All India Radio. Bani Kumar wrote it, Pankaj Mullick composed the music, and Birendra Krishna Bhadra gave it his voice. The first broadcast is usually dated to 1931, though accounts differ.

Illustration of a radio announcer reading a script at a vintage microphone, in the style of Birendra Krishna Bhadra, voice of Mahishasuramardini
An illustration imagining Birendra Krishna Bhadra at the microphone.

If you’re British, here’s the nearest thing you have. Every Christmas Eve since 1928, the BBC has broadcast A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College, Cambridge. It’s a radio ritual of almost exactly the same age, and for millions of people Christmas hasn’t properly started until they’ve heard the first solo voice of “Once in Royal David’s City”. Mahalaya is like that, except that it happens at four in the morning and millions of Bengalis are listening.

Since 1966, the programme has been broadcast from a recording rather than performed live. Bhadra himself died in 1991. And in 1976, All India Radio made the mistake of trying to replace him. It commissioned a new programme, Durga Durgatiharini, voiced by Uttam Kumar, the biggest film star in Bengal.

Listeners revolted. The station apologised publicly and put Bhadra back, and he has never left. Bengal had tried to update its ritual once and decided that the old voice, crackle and all, was the ritual.

The Story the Broadcast Tells

What Bhadra recites is the story of how Durga became Mahishasura Mardini. The battle comes from the Devi Mahatmya, a Sanskrit scripture well over a thousand years old. The story of how Mahishasura won his near-invincibility comes from a later text, the Devi Bhagavata Purana, and the two are usually told together.

Mahishasura was an asura, a demon-titan. Through years of ferocious penance, he earned a boon from Brahma, the creator. He asked never to die. Brahma refused, because everything born must die. So Mahishasura found a loophole: let no god, no demon and no man be able to kill me. If I must die, let it be at the hands of a woman. He didn’t think a woman could.

He went to war with heaven and won. After a hundred years of fighting, the gods were thrown out, and Mahishasura sat on their throne.

So the gods pooled their fury, and it became light: a blazing mountain of it. Inside the blaze, a woman took shape. The scripture describes her form emerging from the gods’ combined energies. But in the Shakta tradition, which worships the Goddess as supreme, she isn’t their creation. She is Shakti, the power that had been behind them all along, and the light only revealed her. They armed her with their weapons anyway: Shiva’s trident, Vishnu’s discus, Indra’s thunderbolt. The Himalaya gave her a lion. She laughed, and the earth shook.

Goddess Durga on her lion slaying the buffalo demon Mahishasura, the story told in the Mahalaya broadcast
Durga and Mahishasura, the battle the Mahalaya broadcast retells.

Mahishasura threw everything at her. He came as a buffalo, then a lion, then a man with a sword, then an elephant, then the buffalo again. Every shape was an attempt to escape. At one point, mid-battle, she stopped to take a drink and told him to roar while he still could. Then she pinned the buffalo under her foot. As the demon’s true form forced its way out of its mouth, her sword came down.

Ancestors, Eyes and a Mother Coming Home

The broadcast is the heart of Mahalaya, but it isn’t the only thing happening that morning.

The ancestors. Mahalaya is the last day of Pitri Paksha, a fortnight Hindus set aside for the dead. If you know All Souls’ Day or Mexico’s Day of the Dead, you’ll recognise the idea. Before dawn, people stand waist-deep in the river and offer water from cupped hands to their parents, grandparents and generations further back. The ritual is called tarpan. It’s a farewell: the fortnight of the ancestors ends this morning, and the fortnight of the Goddess begins tomorrow. Bengal sends off its dead and invites in its goddess on the same dawn.

Bengali men and women offering water to their ancestors at sunrise on the river during Mahalaya tarpan
Tarpan at dawn: offering water to the ancestors on Mahalaya.

The eyes. In Kumartuli, the potters’ quarter of north Kolkata, artisans spend weeks shaping clay statues of Durga for the festival. Mahalaya is traditionally associated with the painting of her eyes, though in busy modern workshops the timing varies. The ritual is called chokkhu daan, “the gift of sight”. Until the eyes are on, the goddess can’t see. After that, she’s looking back at you.

An artist painting the eyes on a clay Durga idol in Kumartuli, Kolkata, for Chokkhu Daan on Mahalaya
Chokkhu Daan: the idol-maker paints the goddess’s eyes on Mahalaya.

The mother. This is the part I most want Western readers to understand. Bengalis don’t really call her Durga. They call her Maa Durga: Mother Durga. Before she is a warrior, she is a mother. She is the mother of the world, who protects her children, and a mother in the most ordinary sense too, of four children of her own: Lakshmi, Saraswati, Ganesha and Kartikeya. Once you see her that way, even the battle reads differently. She isn’t fighting for glory. She’s standing between her children and the thing that would harm them. One of the best-known verses of the Chandi salutes the goddess “who dwells in all beings in the form of the Mother”.

The daughter coming home. Because she is a mother, her homecoming is the most human story of all. As Uma, she married Shiva and went to live far away on Mount Kailash. Once a year, in autumn, she comes home to her own mother, bringing her children with her. If you know the Greek myth of Persephone, who returns every spring from the underworld to her grieving mother, think of Uma as her mirror image, coming home in autumn instead. The songs of the season are welcome songs from a mother who has waited a whole year to see her daughter’s face. For those few days, Durga is both at once: Bengal’s mother, and her own mother’s child. Mahalaya is the morning the waiting turns into calling.

The Food

Here’s something I’ve struggled to explain to Western friends: for Bengalis, food isn’t adjacent to culture. Food is the culture. That deserves a post of its own, and it’ll get one. For now, here’s what Mahalaya tasted like in my family.

In our house, the centre of it was mangshor jhol aar bhaat: Bengali goat curry and rice. Jhol is a thin, fragrant curry, closer to a broth than the thick sauces most British curry houses serve, with potatoes soaking it up and goat on the bone slow-cooked until it gives. Aar just means “and”. Bhaat is rice. It’s the dish for almost every Bengali celebration, and if you’ve never had it, I’m sorry, and also: go and find some.

Mangshor jhol, Bengali goat curry, served with rice on a Mahalaya table
Mangshor jhol aar bhaat, the Mahalaya meal.

Then come the sweets, because there are always sweets. Rasmalai is soft cheese dumplings soaking in sweetened, cardamom-scented milk. Rosogolla is spongy balls of cheese in syrup, Bengal’s most famous sweet. I never liked them, and I’m aware that saying so publicly may cost me my Bengali card. And sandesh is a delicate fresh-cheese sweet, pressed into moulds and faintly flavoured. If you’re only going to try one, make it this.

My Thoughts

I’ve come to think the battle isn’t really the point of the story.

Look at it again. A man games the rules so that no man can stop him. An army of male gods spends a hundred years losing to him. When they’ve finally run out of ideas, they pool everything and hand it to a woman, and she takes ten weapons in ten hands and uses every one of them. Men make the mess. A woman with ten arms cleans it up. If that sounds familiar, ask anyone who grew up in a Bengali household.

But the tradition goes further than a joke about multitasking. She isn’t the gods’ last resort. She’s the power they were borrowing all along. And in Bengal, that power has a face, and it isn’t a soldier’s. The name every Bengali calls her isn’t “warrior”. It’s Maa. Bengal doesn’t celebrate a rescue. It celebrates a mother coming home.

And here’s the strange part. By rights, she shouldn’t be coming home in autumn at all. Her proper worship falls in spring, and autumn is when she’s meant to be asleep. The festival Bengal throws every October is an untimely awakening. Why that is, and who dared to wake her, is the subject of Part 2.

Sixteen years after leaving India, I still wake in the dark on Mahalaya, here in Manchester, and press play. The voice still comes on, and for an hour and a bit I’m ten years old in a dark room in Bengal, half-asleep and certain that something wonderful is about to happen. Maa is on her way.

So here’s my question for you. If you moved halfway across the world, what is the one sound you’d still get up in the dark for?

Shubho Mahalaya. It means “a blessed Mahalaya”.

Before You Go: How to Experience Mahalaya and Durga Puja in the UK

  • Find a local Puja. Bengali associations across the UK hold Durga Puja, and most welcome visitors. Turn up, take your shoes off where others do, and accept any food you’re offered. In Manchester, the Greater Manchester Bengali Hindu Cultural Association marked Mahalaya this year with a sold-out evening at Gandhi Hall in Withington. Search “Durga Puja” plus your city for others.
  • Listen to the broadcast. Recordings of Mahishasuramardini are easy to find online. Try it at four in the morning, in the dark, at least once.
  • Eat. Find a Bengali restaurant or a friend’s kitchen and ask for mangshor jhol and bhaat. Finish with sandesh. To cook it at home, The Kolkata Recipe Diary by Sudeepta and Ratna Banerjee collects recipes from a Bengali home kitchen (Amazon UK).
  • Read the source. The battle the broadcast recites comes from the Devi Mahatmya. T.B. Coburn’s Encountering the Goddess pairs a translation with a study of how the text has been read (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 2: Durga Puja, the Untimely Awakening comes before the Puja begins on 16 October.
  • Part 3: Kali Puja and Diwali follows in November.
  • Support Shin Stories: buymeacoffee.com/shinjanb

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