Durga Puja (Dashain)

From the sixth night (Shashthi) the great worship begins with Bodhan — the “awakening” of Durga out of her natural season — with the Bel-nimantran (inviting her into a bel/wood-apple tree) and the unveiling of the image. She is worshipped as Mahishasura-mardini, the ten-armed goddess slaying the buffalo-demon, flanked by Lakshmi, Saraswati, Ganesha and Kartikeya.

On Saptami the Navapatrika — nine plants bound together (the “Kola-Bou”), banana at their head — is bathed and installed as the goddess’s living body. Maha-ashtami is the peak: the Kumari Puja, worship of a young girl as the living goddess, and at the knife-edge of Ashtami and Navami the Sandhi Puja — the 48 minutes in which Durga became Chamunda — lit with 108 lamps and offered 108 lotuses.

Animal bali (sacrifice) once marked this junction in Shakta practice, but it is today greatly reduced and contested — most homes and pandals now offer a pumpkin, sugarcane or banana in its place.

The tenth day is Vijayadashami — “the victory of the tenth” — marking both Durga’s slaying of Mahishasura and Rama’s defeat of Ravana, for which Rama is said to have first worshipped Durga out of season (the Akal Bodhan).

Two great forms part here. In the Bengali-Bihari strand the women redden the goddess and one another with vermilion in Sindur-khela, then the image is carried in procession and given to the river in visarjan; in the Ramlila strand giant effigies of Ravana, Meghnad and Kumbhakarna are burned at Ravana-dahan.

But for the Mithila plains and all of Nepal, the heart of the day is the Dashain Tika: elders press a tika of red rice-curd-vermilion onto the foreheads of the young and crown them with the golden jamara grown since day one, blessing them with victory and long life — the warmest, most family-centred moment of the whole season.

Mithila is one of the oldest Shakta lands of the subcontinent — a home of the Kalikula tantra and a dense web of goddess shrines. Tradition holds (this is a regional claim, not settled history) that the region’s organised Durga worship is older than Bengal’s, carried by the Maithil tantric lineage. Its living Shaktipeeths anchor the season: Ucchaith, the Vana-Durga where Kalidasa is said to have received his wisdom; Ugratara at Mahishi (Saharsa); and Jay Mangala / Salauna — a Maithil “Shakti triangle.”

The region’s Durga wears its own face: she is painted in Madhubani line-art on the walls and now the pandals, danced into the goddess’s nights as Jhijhiya (see that festival), and was once mounted in royal state by the Darbhanga Raj and the Banaili estate, whose palace pujas set the scale of the public festival.

A caution on geography: Rajrappa (Chhinnamasta), often listed with Mithila’s Shakta sites, lies in Jharkhand, not the Maithil core. And while Bihar’s towns increasingly keep the Bengali pandal style, the Maithil home still keeps its Gosaunik kalash and its painted goddess at the centre.

Durga’s charter is the Devi Mahatmya (the Chandi, c. 5th–6th century, set in the Markandeya Purana): when no god could overcome the buffalo-demon Mahishasura, the gods pooled their energies (tejas) into a single radiant goddess armed by each of them, and she destroyed him over a nine-day battle — hence the nine nights and the tenth-day victory. The autumn timing carries its own story: Rama, needing the goddess’s blessing to defeat Ravana, woke her out of her natural spring season — the Akal Bodhan, the “untimely awakening” — which is why the Sharad (autumn) Navratri begins with a Bodhan rite. Beneath the myth runs the Shakta conviction that the ultimate reality is feminine Shakti, and a clear agrarian layer: the festival falls at the close of the monsoon, as the paddy ripens.

What looks like one festival is really three traditions overlaid. The Bengali-style Durga Puja — Bodhan, Navapatrika, Sandhi Puja, Sindur-khela and river visarjan of a clay image in a community pandal — is now widespread in Bihar’s towns and is a UNESCO “Intangible Cultural Heritage” (inscribed 2021, as Kolkata’s Durga Puja). The Ramlila / Dussehra strand stages Rama’s war and burns the Ravana effigies on Vijayadashami. And the Mithila–Nepal Dashain strand keeps the festival at home — the Gosaunik kalash, the jamara barley, and the elders’ tika — without an idol or a pandal at its core. In much of Bihar today all three run together, a genuine hybrid; the older Maithil layer is the home Shakta worship, not the pandal.

Mithila’s claim on the goddess is deep and distinct. It is a heartland of the Kalikula tantra, dense with Shaktipeeths — Ucchaith (Vana-Durga, tied to Kalidasa), Ugratara at Mahishi, Jay Mangala/Salauna — and the region venerates Durga in its own Madhubani idiom and dances her nights as Jhijhiya. The grand public puja was historically patronised by the Darbhanga Raj and the Banaili estate. Two honesty notes: the popular claim that Mithila’s Durga worship is older than Bengal’s is tradition, not established history; and Rajrappa (Chhinnamasta), often swept into lists of Mithila’s Shakta sites, is in Jharkhand, outside the Maithil core. Animal bali, once central to Shakta Dashain, is now much reduced and widely replaced by a vegetable substitute.