I had a strange experience in Calcutta during Durga Puja last year. I was in the city for the few days of the festival and spent the evening of Panchami chatting with an old friend at the Press Club. I decided to return home a little after nine pm. Stoked by a quirk of memory, I chose to walk along Central Avenue to my home in North Calcutta, not an uncommon habit from my years as a college student in the city.
As I walked, the differences between then and now grew starker, the pavements far more broken and debris piled in between occasional fancy outlets. Around nine-thirty, as I reached the stretch of the pavement opposite Calcutta Medical College, 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. Particularly since the pandemic, the volume of the urban homeless had grown huge. In Delhi, you saw many makeshift homes under flyovers. But it felt shocking to relive an old habit while trekking past so many sleeping bodies. It was a walkway through humanity at its most private and vulnerable. The thought made me want to get off the pavement and run with the traffic.
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 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.
I will never forget that moment. The shining goddess across the road and the angry woman right next to me. Massive lights on one side of the street and sleeping darkness on the other. The truth is that having left the city in 1999, I suffer the diasporic Bengali’s yearning pain of separation from Calcutta in the season of kaash and dhaak every year. Puny festivities in New Jersey, Ontario, and California and the tasteless phuchka and lustre-less icons of Delhi-Gurgaon have only sharpened the pangs. A North Calcutta childhood, the neighbourhood air of Baghbazar and Kumartuli, have crafted a sensitivity to the face and the form of the idol to the point that no Puja outside of Calcutta ever makes me happy. That night brought no knowledge of realities I didn’t already know. But my emotion for a Calcutta Puja will not recover from the curse of that half-asleep woman.
The moment was such a jolt because it laid bare the futility of symbolism. The deception of the myth of the goddess, of Shakti, of whatever kind of aesthetic and affective anodyne we buy from time to time to cover the naked realities of homelessness, humiliation and violence, most of all towards women. A feminist I love writes: “I have always had a deep mistrust of the idea of Shakti. I have considered it a sop thrown at women to give them the illusion of power, the dust thrown up to conceal the complete control of their lives by others.” Shashi Deshpande continues, a realist in her politics as in her aesthetics: “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.”
I remember falling in its spell for the longest time. When Hillary Clinton’s loss to Barack Obama’s nomination as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate in 2007 raised the question why is it easier for a black man to rise to the American presidency over a woman, even a white woman, I discussed powerful, charismatic, even dictatorial South Asian women political leaders with my American friends and colleagues. One reason, I would argue, was that Protestantism has no myths about powerful women, that no significant celebration of female strength and glory existed in that deeply patriarchal religion. Hinduism, in contrast, has the powerful legend of Shakti, the restless, revolving energy to the quiet and dormant Purush, manifesting in the tales of versatile, talented, creative and destructive goddesses. The visible and invisible force of the legend is harnessed behind the rise and prosperity of women leaders, many of whom go on to overshadow their male patrons and family predecessors in public life.
As Kamala Harris rises without the support of a myth and not without significant Left-Liberal reservations about her, I return to the gigantic falsity of female myths vis-à-vis the reality of women’s lives in India. Well, at least women leaders are a symbolic leap and promise for the welfare of women, right? A rhetoric scholar who writes on the speeches of women politicians disagrees in a private conversation — the election of women leaders, she feels, makes a negligible difference in the lives of real women, on streets and in homes. Sometimes it takes a powerful woman politician to make light of masculine acts of sexual violence on women.
But the life of a symbol is magically resilient. It rises to the sky and pervades the air. There is the smell of autumn and the sound of the dhaak. The symbol thrives against reality, the pandal right next to the homeless woman. Now we look at a Puja where both sides of the street have gone dark. Remember the news cycle that became the play of lights around Puja pandals? World Cup, Chandrayaan, farmers’ protests? What light will illumine the city’s tragedy this Puja? The sadness and grotesquerie of our female symbol this year has vanquished the opiate symbol of Shakti.
The most powerful gesture has already been struck by the women in the city’s red-light district who’ve pledged to refuse to donate their soil to shape the icon. The symbolism of reality has finally drowned the symbolism of myth. This Puja, the brightest light is that of darkness.
Saikat Majumdar’s most recent book is The Remains of the Body
