One Goddess, a Thousand Temples
Shakti Peethas, Vindhyavasini, Kolkata's Kali, Vaishno Devi; Durga Puja in Bengal, the artisans, the immersion.
Shakti Peethas, Vindhyavasini, Kolkata's Kali, Vaishno Devi; Durga Puja in Bengal, the artisans, the immersion.
The Idol That Is Made to Be Given Back
Six weeks before Durga Puja, in the narrow lanes of Kumartuli in Kolkata, an idol-maker named Nemai works knee-deep in wet clay. The armature is straw and bamboo, lashed by hand. Over it he presses clay dug from the Ganga, layer on layer, until the shape of the Goddess rises: ten arms, the lion, the buffalo-demon beneath her spear. The lanes smell of river mud and drying paint. The eyes are still blank; they will be painted last, in a rite called the giving of the eyes, on an auspicious morning.
Nemai will spend two months on this figure. And he knows, with every layer he smooths, exactly where it is going. In ten days of festival it will be worshipped by thousands, and then it will be carried to the river and let go, dissolved back into the same clay it came from. He is making something beautiful precisely in order to give it back. That fact, which a visitor finds almost unbearable, is the deepest teaching of the living tradition.
One Goddess, Held Across a Whole Land
Step back from Kumartuli and look at the map. The Goddess of this course is not kept in one shrine. She is held across the entire subcontinent, in a network so old and so wide that a person could spend a life visiting it.
There are the Shakti Peethas, the seats of the Goddess. The tradition tells that when the body of Sati was scattered across the land, each place where a part fell became a seat of her power, dozens of them, from Kamakhya in the east to sites across the north and south. There are the great independent shrines:
- Vaishno Devi in the Jammu hills, where millions climb a mountain track each year to a cave.
- Vindhyavasini on the Ganga, worshipped as the Goddess who took birth to slay Shumbha and Nishumbha.
- Kalighat in Kolkata, the fierce Mother who gave the city its name.
- Kamakhya in Assam, the Goddess in her most primal, life-giving form.