Durga Puja in Bengal is among the largest religious festivals in the world and one of the few where the object of worship is built to be destroyed.
The images are made of unfired clay over straw and bamboo armatures, in the potters' quarter of north Kolkata called Kumartuli, where the workshops run year-round for an autumn deadline. Tradition holds that the clay should include soil taken from outside a brothel, on the reasoning that the men who go there leave their virtue at the door and the earth has it; the custom is discussed, disputed and in places quietly dropped, and it says something about what the festival thinks it is doing that the story persists at all.
The images show Durga killing Mahisha, flanked by Lakshmi, Saraswati, Ganesha and Kartikeya, so that the warrior goddess is also presented as a daughter come home with her family. That framing carries the emotional weight in Bengal: the songs are about a daughter's brief annual visit to her parents, and the last day is a departure. Neighbourhood committees commission pandals, temporary structures that have become an architectural competition in their own right, some of them elaborate reconstructions of buildings, some of them pointed social commentary.
On the tenth day the images are carried to the river and immersed. The clay dissolves, the straw is recovered, and nothing is kept. UNESCO inscribed Durga Puja in Kolkata on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2021.
Elsewhere the same nine nights are Navaratri, kept differently: fasting and garba dancing in Gujarat, the display of stepped arrangements of dolls in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, and the burning of Ravana effigies at Dussehra in the north, where the tenth day belongs to Rama rather than to Durga. One calendar, several festivals, and they are not variants of a single original.