Every autumn, something happens in Bengal that cannot be explained to anyone who has not lived it. The sky turns a particular shade of blue, kaash phul sways white along the riverbanks, the smell of shiuli flowers fills the morning air, and somewhere inside every Bengali, a switch flips. Ma is coming home. Not a deity arriving for worship. A daughter arriving for a visit. That distinction is the whole story, and it is the distinction that a self proclaimed godman from Madhya Pradesh could not grasp even if he spent his entire life trying.
The Story Older Than Memory
The tale itself is simple enough to tell a child. The buffalo demon Mahishasura had grown so powerful through his penance that no single god could kill him, because his boon protected him from any man or god. So the gods pooled their fury into one being. Every god handed her a weapon. Shiva gave his trident, Vishnu his discus, Indra his thunderbolt, Himavan a lion to ride. From that combined light rose Durga, ten armed, unstoppable, and after nine nights of battle she killed the demon on the tenth day. That day is Vijaya Dashami.
This is not folk invention dressed up as antiquity. The earliest surviving full account is the Devi Mahatmya, embedded inside the Markandeya Purana and generally dated by scholars to somewhere between the fifth and seventh centuries CE. Priests across Bengal still recite this exact text, called the Chandipath, on Mahalaya morning, word for word as it has been recited for roughly one and a half thousand years. Before that text was compiled, the seventh century writer Banabhatta was already describing tribal hunting communities in eastern India worshipping a fierce forest goddess with blood offerings in his Kadambari and Harshacharita, and Kalidasa's poetry from the fifth century carries the same undertones of Devi worship threaded through the Gupta era landscape. This is a religious memory with a documented paper trail stretching back through fifteen to twenty centuries, not a marketing invention of the last few decades.
Bengal added its own layer on top of the pan Indian myth, and this layer is what makes Durga Puja Bengali rather than merely Hindu. The traditional Vedic calendar places Devi worship in spring, known in Bengal as Basanti Puja. But the fifteenth century poet Krittibas Ojha, in his Bengali retelling of the Ramayana, gave the festival its autumn soul. He wrote that Rama, before his final battle with Ravana, invoked Durga out of season, an akal bodhon, an untimely awakening, to seek her blessing. That single poetic choice is why more than a hundred million Bengalis worship the goddess in autumn instead of spring. Two centuries later, Mukundaram Chakrabarti's Chandimangal Kavya carried Chandi, another form of Durga, into the daily lives of merchants, hunters and ordinary villagers, cementing her as a goddess of the people rather than a distant Vedic abstraction. This is what a thousand years of literature and inscription actually looks like. It is not a rumour. It is a chain of named authors, named texts and datable manuscripts.
A Homecoming Written Into History
The community festival Bengal now celebrates has its own separate, well recorded timeline. The first documented Durga Puja in Bengal was organised in 1606 in Nadia by Bhavananda, ancestor of the Krishnachandra royal line. In Kolkata, the Sabarna Choudhury family of Barisha started their household puja in 1610, and it continues in the same unbroken style even today. In 1757, Raja Nabakrishna Deb of Sovabazar Rajbari turned his family puja into a grand political statement, reportedly timed to celebrate the British victory at Plassey, and it became the template every aristocratic family in Bengal wanted to copy, complete with European guests and imported chandeliers as measures of status. Then, in 1790, in Guptipara in Hooghly district, twelve friends who had been denied entry into an aristocrat's puja pooled their own money and started what became known as the Baro Yaari Puja, the twelve pals' puja. That single act of exclusion and response is the seed of the Sarbojanin, the everyone's puja, the community funded model that now defines Kolkata's streets. A festival that began behind the walls of zamindar mansions walked out into the open and became the property of everyone, rich or poor, upper caste or lower caste, Hindu or not.
This is the part outsiders never understand. Durga Puja in Bengal was never only a religious transaction between devotee and deity. It became, deliberately and by design, a shared civic canvas. In 2021 UNESCO inscribed Kolkata's Durga Puja on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, only the fourteenth entry from India on that list. UNESCO's own citation noted that during the festival the divides of class, religion and ethnicities collapse, as the entire city walks the streets together, admiring art installations that took artisans months to build. Muslim artisans in Kumartuli sculpt the goddess from clay pulled out of the Ganga. Muslim and Christian neighbours pandal hop alongside Hindu families. There is no equivalent anywhere else on earth where an entire metropolitan population, across religious lines, spends ten days building, funding and celebrating one shared work of public art. That is why it earned world heritage status. Not because it is old. Because nothing else like it exists.
Maa, Meye, Pishi, Mashi
Here is the emotional centre that a visiting preacher from outside Bengal will never feel in his bones, because it was never taught to him, it was absorbed through generations of mothers, aunts and grandmothers.
In the Bengali imagination, Durga is not a distant, untouchable, ten armed war goddess sitting on a cosmic throne. She is Uma. She is the married daughter of the Himalayas who now lives with her husband Shiva in Kailash, and once a year, for exactly four days, she comes back to her father's house, her baaper bari, bringing her four children with her, Lakshmi, Saraswati, Ganesh and Kartik. Every Bengali who has ever waited at a train station or a bus stand for a sister, a daughter, an aunt to come home for the festival season understands this festival at a cellular level, because they are enacting the same ritual their goddess enacts. Maa is coming, and for four days the house will be full, and on the fifth day, Bijoya Dashami, she must go back to her husband's house, and every Bengali will genuinely cry saying goodbye to a clay idol, because it is never really a clay idol they are mourning. It is every daughter, every meye, every pishi, every mashi who has ever had to leave her father's home behind after a short visit and return to her sasurbari.
That is why married women perform Sindoor Khela on the final day, smearing vermillion on the goddess and on each other, sending her off the way you would send off your own sister, weeping and laughing in the same breath, saying "abar esho maa," come again next year, mother. No liturgical manual anywhere prescribes crying at a farewell to a goddess. Bengal does it anyway, because in Bengal the goddess was never separated from the daughter. This is not superstition. This is a five hundred year old cultural technology for processing love, separation and the passage of time, wrapped inside a festival, and it belongs to Bengalis in a way that cannot be replicated by a photocopy of the ritual performed anywhere else in the country.
Enter The Outsider
Into this living, breathing, thousand year old civilizational memory walked Dhirendra Krishna Shastri, better known by his branded stage name Bageshwar Baba, during his Hanumant Katha programme in Howrah this September. He told his audience to stop selling and eating non vegetarian food around Durga Puja pandals and called anyone who eats meat during the festival a "pakhandi," a hypocrite. He asked the crowd to flash their phone torches if they wanted non vegetarian food markets shut down across West Bengal during Puja.
Let that sink in. A man from Chhatarpur in Madhya Pradesh, who built his entire national fame not on Vedic scholarship but on staged "Divya Darbar" sessions where he claims to read strangers' names, phone numbers and personal problems without being told anything, walked into Bengal and tried to dictate what a Bengali should eat during her own goddess's homecoming.
The backlash was immediate and it cut across party lines, which tells you everything about how badly he misjudged the room. West Bengal's own BJP president Samik Bhattacharya publicly rejected him, pointing out that eating luchi on Ashtami and goat meat on Navami is simply Bengali custom, and that no preacher or party gets to dictate what Bengalis eat. State leader Dilip Ghosh reminded everyone that goat sacrifice and eating the meat as prasad has been tied to Durga Puja worship in Bengal for generations. The Congress party in South Kolkata filed a police complaint against him. Even the ruling Trinamool's own social media wing accused the BJP of using him to quietly push fish and meat off Bengali plates ahead of the festival. When a man manages to unite BJP state leadership, Congress workers and Trinamool's digital cell against him inside the same week, he has not made a devotional appeal. He has revealed how little he understood the ground he was standing on.
He Does Not Know What He Is Talking About, And He Should Say So
Here is the plain truth. Bageshwar Baba is not a Sanskrit scholar. There is no public record of him publishing scriptural commentary, teaching Vedic exegesis, or engaging seriously with the Upanishads. His fame rests on television spectacle, not textual authority. His signature act, the claim that he can read a stranger's name, phone number and personal troubles without being told, was directly challenged in 2023 by Nagpur based rationalist Shyam Manav, who offered him thirty lakh rupees to repeat the trick under controlled conditions with people Manav selected. Shastri did not take the test. He cut his Nagpur programme short and left the city. That is not a footnote. That is the single most important fact anyone should know before treating his religious pronouncements as authoritative. He has also previously had to publicly apologise after mocking the Marathi saint Tukaram, an episode that drew protests from the Bhim Army and forced a retraction. A man with that track record of overreach and retreat does not get to arrive in Bengal and instruct a civilization with a documented millennium of textual and ritual history on how to worship its own mother.
And the irony runs deeper than mere outsider arrogance. Bengal's Shakta tradition, the theology that actually produced Durga Puja, has never been a purely vegetarian, purely sattvic Vaishnava affair. Blood sacrifice and non vegetarian bhog have been part of Shakta ritual for centuries precisely because the goddess in this tradition is fierce, embodied, and demands offerings that match her ferocity, not a sanitised vegetarian purity imported from a completely different devotional school. Bali, animal sacrifice, still happens at Kalighat and Tarapith and inside many of Kolkata's oldest bonedi bari pujas on Ashtami. Khichuri bhog with fish appears in many community pujas. Mutton on Navami is not a lapse from devotion in Bengal, it is devotion, expressed the way this specific culture has always expressed it. A preacher who built his career on Ram Katha and Hanuman Katha, both firmly Vaishnava traditions from a different theological universe, trying to impose Vaishnava dietary purity onto Shakta Bengal is not a minor cultural misstep. It is proof that he does not understand the goddess he claims to be defending. You cannot lecture a household about its mother's preferences when you have never once sat at her table.
To be fair, Shastri does command a genuine following of millions across northern and central India, and organisations like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad have issued similar advisories urging food restrictions near pandals, framing it as devotional discipline rather than cultural interference. That defence deserves to be stated plainly, because pretending he speaks for nobody would be dishonest. But a following elsewhere does not translate into standing here. Popularity in Chhatarpur is not a licence to edit the customs of Kolkata.
What Bengal Actually Owes The World
Durga Puja is Bengal's answer to the question of what happens when religion, art, family and civic life are allowed to fuse into a single ten day event, openly, publicly, without gatekeeping. It is the only Indian festival on UNESCO's global heritage list built entirely around one city's public celebration. Nothing else comes close to its density of craftsmanship, its scale of community funding, its layering of a thousand year old myth onto a deeply personal, deeply domestic story of a daughter's homecoming. It does not need validation from a preacher who cannot answer a rationalist's simple challenge, who has never engaged with the Puranas he claims to represent, and who clearly does not know that in this state, the goddess is not merely worshipped. She is fed, mourned, teased, dressed up and sent off in tears every single year, exactly like every other daughter Bengal has ever loved and let go.
Bengal has been doing this for longer than anyone alive can remember. It will keep doing it long after this controversy is forgotten, because unlike a viral sermon, it was never built for attention. It was built for a mother coming home.
References
- The Week, "Row over Bageshwar Baba's food remarks refuses to die down," September 2026
- Outlook India, "Who Is Dhirendra Shastri? The Bageshwar Baba At The Centre Of Bengal's Durga Puja Row," September 2026
- Indiablooms, "No non veg near Durga Puja pandals: Bageshwar Baba's big Bengal appeal sparks controversy," September 2026
- Scroll.in, "Meet the rationalist who challenged the controversial priest of Bageshwar Dham"
- Newslaundry, "How ABP's crusade against superstition turned into mythmaking"
- IANS, "After furore, Bageshwar Baba apologises for slur on Sant Tukaram"
- UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Lists, "Durga Puja in Kolkata," inscribed 2021
- The Wire, "Durga Puja history and UNESCO cultural heritage"
- Encyclopedia.pub, entry on the history of Durga Puja and the Devi Mahatmya
- Traditional textual sources referenced: Devi Mahatmya (Markandeya Purana), Krittibas Ojha's Bengali Ramayana, Mukundaram Chakrabarti's Chandimangal Kavya, Banabhatta's Kadambari and Harshacharita
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