Durgaदुर्गा

Durga (दुर्गा) is the great warrior form of the Goddess: golden, many-armed, serene of face even in battle, mounted on a lion or tiger and carrying in her hands the weapons of every god. Her name is commonly explained as the inaccessible or the invincible — she who is difficult to approach, a fortress in herself. She exists for one purpose the myths never tire of restating: when a demon has grown too strong for the gods, by boon or by austerity, the Goddess does what they cannot.

In the texts

Durga's charter text is the Devi Mahatmya, composed within the Markandeya Purana in roughly the middle of the first millennium. Its central episode tells how the buffalo-demon Mahishasura, unassailable by any male being, drove the gods from heaven; from their pooled anger and radiance a female form condensed, each god contributing a weapon — the trident of Shiva, the discus of Vishnu, the thunderbolt of Indra — and the lion of the mountain god as her mount. The battle ends with the goddess pinning the buffalo beneath her foot and beheading the demon as he emerges from it. Earlier strata of the tradition know her too: hymns to Durga appear in the Mahabharata, and a Durga invocation stands among the Gayatri variants of the Taittiriya Aranyaka.

Iconography

Her images range from eight to eighteen arms, the weapons fanned like a peacock's tail, the demon-slaying scene — Mahishasuramardini — being the commonest subject from Kushan terracottas to the Pallava reliefs of Mahabalipuram and the clay images of modern Bengal. The iconographic constant is the contrast the texts insist on: limbs in violent action, face untroubled. She fights, the tradition says, without anger's bondage — evil is removed as a gardener removes a weed.

Worship

Durga's great festival is Navaratri, the nine nights of the autumn, closing on Vijayadashami, the tenth day of victory. In Bengal and wherever Bengalis have settled it takes the form of Durga Puja, in which elaborately sculpted clay images of the goddess and her children are worshipped for days and then immersed in the river — one of the largest recurring religious festivals in the world, and the emotional centre of the Bengali year. The Devi Mahatmya is recited through the festival, and domestic worship of the goddess as daughter and protector runs alongside the public spectacle.

Legacy

Durga fused the martial goddesses of many regions into one figure without erasing them; she remains the face under which the Great Goddess is most widely loved. Her image — armed to the teeth and perfectly calm — has served kings as a war-banner and householders as a mother, and it carries the Shakta tradition's central intuition: that the power which protects the world is feminine, and that it is enough.