Three years ago, I had a disturbing Pujo experience. Late in the evening before the first day of the festival, I was walking from central to north Calcutta along Central Avenue, which has become a collection of broken pavements and debris in between fancy retail outlets.
Around 9.30 pm, as I reached the stretch of the pavement opposite Calcutta Medical College, I realised that I was walking through many scattered sleeping bodies. The streets of Calcutta were always home to the homeless, but the number of sleepers felt overwhelming.
The broken series of pavements was now a walkway through humanity at its most private and vulnerable. Mohammad Ali Park, the jewel in the crown of my childhood Puja-hopping memories, was bright with the goddess on the other side of the street.
People had thronged to catch an early glimpse. Suddenly, I realised I’d reached a dead end. A woman sat up and shouted at me. I saw the bit of the pavement was closed off with cloth and wicker.
I had to turn back. She shouted again, cursing me. She had made a bedroom of that stretch. I turned back, walking all the way to step out on the road.
It has remained a moment hard to process. The shining goddess across the road and the angry woman right next to me.
Incandescence on one side of the street and sleeping darkness on the other. None of these were realities I didn’t already know. But my emotion for a Calcutta Puja will never recover from the curse of that half-asleep woman.
As we crawl towards Puja season this year, the city pavement remains darkened by the story Kolkata is calling “Sita versus Agnimitra.”
On August 23, West Bengal’s Urban Development Minister Agnimitra Paul ran into a makeshift home and kitchen on the pavement of Park Street, the city’s club and restaurant hub. An aged woman, Rashida, was heating a pot of milk on a kerosene stove for her grandson.
The minister came down on this woman like a goddess of destruction, accusing her of threatening a fire hazard and questioning her right to set up home on the busy street.
In a video available on the website of a popular city daily, Rashida is recorded as saying that she hasn’t dared to warm milk for the child since then, and all she has been giving him is sugared water.
She went on to speak about how she came to Calcutta from Punjab as a young bride with her husband, who has now thrown her out of the room inside the building where he continues to live. With nowhere to go, Rashida now lives on the pavement in front of the building.
Now a senior citizen, she makes a living scavenging garbage. She is terrified of the ‘didi’ who threatened her. Her story spread like wildfire across the city, agitating citizens and politicians, and has brought many visitors to her, including local police, who have assured her that her ‘home’ on the street is safe and that she will not be evicted from her spot. Bengal’s chief minister, Suvendu Adhikari, finally pledged a home for pavement-dwelling Rashida.
In that video, Rashida tells her audience that she was born Sita, a Hindu girl, and that she became Rashida only after marrying a Muslim man.
On the streets of Kolkata, the fate of home and homelessness crystallise political regimes. Under the rule of a powerful chief minister who invoked the representation of the ‘grassroot’ population, the homeless growled at you if you dared to step into their threshold. In the new regime that promises the elimination of the ‘illegitimate’, a makeshift kitchen on the street, be it to warm a child’s milk, is something to be uprooted fiercely.
The irony of symbolism is never unmasked with such swift cruelty as it is done in Kolkata on the eve of Durga Puja. Here, reality echoes the disenchanted words of the writer Shashi Deshpande, for whom the idea of Shakti jostles with a sop thrown to women to create the illusion of power: “At the other end of this idea of the Trishul-wielding goddess is the reality of most women’s lives, lives in which strength turns into endurance, into a struggle for sheer survival.”
As the bride from Kailash prepares to return to her birth home for the auspicious four-day visit, a fierce woman minister threatens to evict a poor aging woman who had arrived here decades ago, drawn by the bond of marriage.
The harsh truth is that the making of symbols reflect reality, but reality feels no obligation to return the favour. Reality breaks the bond whenever larger structures of history push it to do so, no matter how sacred the symbol is, no matter how deeply entrenched in myth or religion.
Made by human discourse, symbols are also strangely vulnerable to human manipulation. You are free to believe in religious or mythic symbolism till someone more powerful comes and orders you to change the shape of your symbol.
The real force behind the symbol of Shakti is neither Durga nor Kali but human collectives in power. Does Kali eat meat, drink and smoke?
A few years ago, a Bengali politician, a prominent and articulate woman, had raised a storm in the parliament and the nation with such a claim. Does the claim follow established symbolism? It certainly does. The dark, blood-smeared goddess, garlanded by a chain of severed demon heads, has traditionally drawn animal sacrifice and is depicted as revelling in the haze of pot smoke which keeps her divine husband in bliss.
One may debate the tribal identity of this militant incarnation of Durga, but whether or not that is true, it would be laughable to question the sanctity of the meat-eating goddess in the pantheon of the bhadralok Hindu Bengali.
A strange Durga Puja looms ahead as the human collective in power seeks a costly correction to the Bengali Hindu symbolism of Shakti. Calls to avoid eating and selling non-vegetarian food near Puja pandals during Maha-Navami has been aired by current designers of Hindu symbolism backed by the state political establishment.
Navami, the traditional day of ritual animal-slaughter long replaced by vegetable-sacrifice, remains the signature day for curried goat feast – luchi-mangsho for many Bengalis. The luchi-mangsho loving Bengali may have hit back with wounded humour and literary sarcasm, but there’s no denying that this is an uneven battle: a saffron collective that claims the national and global guardianship of Hindutva against what it doubtless sees as suspicious practitioners of Hinduism.
The urban Hindu bhadralok with their supposed Leftist leanings – for whom Durga Puja has always been more a cultural carnival rather than a religious ceremony – is only the most visible target of this suspicion.
Throughout Bengal, particularly throughout its villages, forests, riverbanks and every other marginal space, dwell strands of Hindu identity that would be barely recognisable to its now-dominant political guardians. Likewise, it is doubtful that many of them would recognise vegetarian, Brahminical Hinduism. It is indeed a strange season of mutual unrecognition, and the hostility that overpowers it. The chief minister has again sought to clear the air by eating fish as part of food offered to Kali at Kalighat temple. But in the long run, the battle around the disruptive plurality of Hinduism is more than clear.
Hindutva has found its final and inevitable target – the Hindus.
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