By Deepa Majumdar
This article is dedicated to our historical Durga–the Holy Mother, Sarada Devi. It is inspired by Revered Swami Ishatmanandaji’s article – Ma Durga: The Symbol of Hinduism – from which all quotations and citations are drawn.
In my earliest recollections of Durga Puja at the Ramakrishna Mission in the Shillong-of-the-sixties, I missed the great Goddess altogether – because I was mesmerized by the terrifying green Mahisasura – the buffalo-demon, who conquered the gods and ruled them. Small as I was, he was more accessible to my eye-level than was Durga Herself. The ubiquitous Christian devil could not have frightened me more. Here was a creature that possessed the temerity to oppose the Divine, in a theistic tradition that has no real equivalent of the devil. Because God is, in the end, beyond good and evil, even in theistic Hindu texts like the Bhagavadgītā, nothing really opposes the Divine – neither the devil, nor nothingness, nor matter – the three standard antitheses of the Divine in western thought. Mahisasura was for me more menacing than Durga’s lion with his flashing teeth.
As my gaze would then slowlytravel upwards, I would stand still, even more mesmerized, at this feast for the eyes – a leonine Goddess astride a lion – every nuance in her image meant to evoke awe – for She stood for Shaktior strength. Her ten arms remain with me to this day as a grand deca-symbol of Shakti. Her posture of slaying Mahisasura – without appearing in the least grotesque, but rather, powerful – taught me that slaying evil is a non-violent act. For evil cannot be slayed by further evil, but only by dousing it with goodand thusopposing it. Every vice is quelled by its matching virtue. The all-encompassing virtue that slays all vices, with the greatest potency, is the virtue of forgiveness. Evil must be slaughtered. But it can be slaughtered only by good, even as fire can be doused only by water, which is its opposite.
The Abrahamic religions have a sorry history of destroying other religions in the name of fighting idolatry. But what, in essence, is idolatry? Is it inspired by a physical form, or “idol,” used to represent the Divine – or is it something in our hearts? To me, idolatry transpires not in the external symbol, but more in our hearts, whenever we worship something else in the place of God – whether intellect, or the quality of an icon, or a position within the clergy. In short, the dangers of idolatry abound –all the more within ecclesiastical groups in organized religion. Compared to the temptations of idolatry in the form of power, position, and intellect within ecclesiastical ranks, the co-called idol is innocent. For the idol need not confer idolatry. The meditative act of transcending one’s own mind being difficult for most people, human beings have, since time immemorial, needed material forms to represent the Divine. The word “idol” has a negative connotation. It reeks of a certain colonial-Christian disdain for the religion of the heathen. But the word “Icon” perhaps ushers a new type of respectability. Indeed, the Icon stands at the threshold of Truth – in between the Divine, which rules from beyond the subject-object divide – and the meditating human mind which veils the Icon in its own philosophical paradigm.The Icon is not the product of artistic imagination. The Icon of Mother Durga was received not through the anvil of some artist’s imagination – but through revelation in the depths of meditation. Unicorns and mermaids are the products of human imagination – not the Gods and Goddesses.
Born out of the luminous sphere of divine Incandescence – or the combined energies of the gods, including the trinitarian Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva – Durga incarnated in this phenomenal world in order to redeem it. Described in the Chandi (1-81) as “most beautiful among all beautiful things in the world,” Durga is the “Redeemer of Sorrow.” As the infusion of the eternal into the temporal, omnipresent-omnipotent Durga comes to unify. While Mahisasura may be literally the buffalo-demon, he stands also for our inner ego-laden cancerous darkness – to be vanquished by the might of Mother Durga who also resides within us as our force of goodness. Their visible asymmetry – that She, ten-armed and astride a lion, towers over him effortlessly, while he cowers at her feet – inspires confidence and hope in human nature. It affirms our inner asymmetry – that the good within us far outweighs our inner evil. When by worshipping Her we overcome the Mahisasura within us, we win heaven and earth … For along with inner purity come the results of the virtues – well-being and wealth (Laxmi), knowledge (Saraswati), success (Ganesha), and valor (Kartik).
Given the grim reality of the plight of young women in India today, we might seek a different interpretation of Mahisasura. Although it is touching in the extreme to see in the ritual of the Kumari Puja, ardent monks worshipping a little girl – perhaps we need more. One result of colonialism and contact with the west is a swing from the inwardness inherent in Indian culture, to the outward eye of the west – from the zeal for inner purification to the zeal for social justice. Anything but clashing, these two stances are, in fact, fundamentally related. The external Mahisasura after all is an expression of our inner Mahisasura. The patriarchal Mahisasuraof contemporary India may be interpreted as an ominous combination of pimps, rapists, violent mothers-in-law, and wife-beaters abhorred by virtuous men and women alike. And the awe-inspiring Mother Durga Herself might be understood as the most righteous, virginal, cosmic and acosmic power of justified feminist wrath – a dispassionate wrath full of might because it is non-violent and bereft of hatred. Indeed Mother Durga’s face is anything but angry. Of all Her facial expressions, what strikes me most is that palpable regal might – the kind of effortlesspower that can never arise from anger or hatred.
There is little point in worshipping Mother Durga with pomp and glory once a year, if we do not respect her representatives on earth with the same zeal every day of our lives. A society in which little girls do not feel safe and young women live in terror – accosted by wolf whistles and “eve-teasing” – can only incur the wrath of the divine Durga. The same is true of the abuse of boys and young men. Therefore, the best way perhaps is to inculcate the power of Durga in the hearts and minds of our children – so that they may transcend gender altogether and ascend to the all-shining stature of true Self-knowledge – by enkindling and uniting with the inmost Durga.