GUPTIPARA- THE BIRTHPLACE OF DURGA PUJA

The pandemic has ensured that this year’s Durga Puja festivities will be remembered, but sadly for being the most low-key celebration in decades. As Bengalis mourn the scaling down of the largest festival in their year, it’s worth asking how worshipping the Goddess acquired this special place in their hearts.

Until as recently as the late 1700s, Durga Puja in Bengal was not a festival of the masses. The puja was restricted to the houses of rajas and zamindars. Some commoners had access to the pujas, but only as visitors, by invitation. Durga Puja was essentially a celebration of the rich and the powerful. The main reason for this was that the Puja was an expensive affair. It ran for four days and involved numerous rituals that were impossible for the common man to sustain financially.

It was an incident in a nondescript village in the Hooghly region that turned the tide. Guptipara, about 100 km from Kolkata, is the reason that Durga Puja became democratised.

In the late 1700s, a group of young men from the village of Guptipara were rudely refused entry to the Durga Puja underway at a local zamindar’s grand house. Angry at this refusal, they decided to carry out their own Puja. A report in the magazine Friends of India published out of Serampore in 1820 states that “…a new species of pooja which has been introduced into Bengal within the last thirty years called Barowaree. About thirty years ago at Gooptipara [sic] near Santipoora… a number of Brahmins formed an association for the celebration of a pooja independently of the rule of the Shastras. They elected twelve men as a committee, from which circumstances it takes its name and solicited subscriptions in all surrounding villages.”

Thus started the baro-yaar-i (of 12 friends) or barowari puja in Bengal. At this point, the deity worshipped was Bindhyabasini, a form of the Goddess synonymous with Jagadhatri. It is further mentioned in Friends of India that “…they celebrated worship of Jugudhatree for seven days with such splendour, as to attract the rich from a distance more than a hundred miles. The formula of worship was of course regulated by the established practice of Hindoo rituals but beyond this the whole was formed on a plan not recognized by the Shastras. They obtained the most excellent singers to be found in Bengal, entertained every Brahmin who arrived and spent the week in all intoxication of festivity and enjoyment. On the successful termination of the scheme, they determined to render the pooja annual and it has since been celebrated with undeviating regularity.”

Once Guptipara had proved that this could be done, the custom spread to the neighbouring towns of Chinsurah, Santipur, Kancharapara and finally Kolkata. In Kolkata, the community Durga Puja expanded from Barowari to Sarbojanin (everyone’s Durga Puja), which became more elaborate and expensive. Sudeshna Banerjee mentions in her book, Durga Puja, Celebrating the Goddess: Then And Now (2006), that in 1910, probably the first Sarbojanin Durgapuja was held in Kolkata at Balaram Basu Ghat Road, organised by the Sanatan Dharmotsahini Sabha. Soon, local clubs in the areas of Ramdhan Mitra Lane and Sikdar Bagan were holding Durga Puja festivities too. Prominent Sarbojanin Durga Puja committees like the Simla Byatam Samiti and Bagabazar Sarbojanin began to take shape.

Durga Puja was no longer the preserve of the rich and powerful.

Although the Barowari Puja originated in Guptipara, it is no longer the primary festival of that town. With its Vaishnava influence, it is the Ratha Yatra that is the prime festival and attracts the largest crowds. And so it is that as all of Bengal gathers to revel in the festival of the year, the little village that started it all is, sadly, no longer in the limelight.

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