In the autumn, when the rains have passed and the light in Kolkata turns gold, the city builds temporary palaces of bamboo and cloth and brings the Goddess home. She arrives with ten arms, a lion beneath her, a demon at her feet, and the calm face of a mother looking at her children. For five days the streets belong to her. Then she is carried to the river and let go, and the city weeps a little and starts counting the days until next year.
That is Durga Puja in Bengal, but the same Goddess is welcomed in the Navaratri garba circles of Gujarat, the doll displays of Tamil homes, the royal procession of Mysore and the nine nights of fasting in the north. Behind all of it is one story and one word. The story is the killing of the buffalo demon. The word is Shakti.
What Shakti means
Shakti comes from the Sanskrit root shak, to be able. It means power, energy, capacity: the ability to do. In Hindu thought this power is not an abstraction. It is feminine, it is personal, and it is the Goddess herself. Every god has his Shakti, and without her, the tradition says bluntly, he cannot act. A well-known saying in the Shakta and tantric schools is that Shiva without Shakti is shava, a corpse. Consciousness alone is still; power is what moves.
So when Hindus worship Durga, they are not worshipping one goddess among many. They are worshipping the active power behind all creation, the energy that makes the sun burn and the seed split and the heart keep beating.
The text that tells her story is the Devi Mahatmya, "the glory of the Goddess", a section of the Markandeya Purana about seven hundred verses long, which is why it is also called the Durga Saptashati (seven hundred) or, in Bengal, simply the Chandi. It is probably the most recited scripture in Shakta Hinduism, and it contains a verse chanted in temples every day:
To the Goddess who abides in all beings in the form of power, salutations to her, salutations to her, salutations to her, again and again.
(Devi Mahatmya, chapter 5)
The buffalo demon
Mahishasura, whose name simply means "buffalo demon", performed long austerities and won from Brahma a boon that no man and no god could kill him. He did not ask for protection from a woman, because it did not occur to him that a woman could be a threat. Armed with his boon, he drove the gods from heaven and took Indra's throne.
The defeated gods went to Vishnu and Shiva, and as they told their story the anger of all the gods together poured out of their bodies as light. The light gathered into a single blaze, and from the blaze emerged a woman. Her face was formed from the light of Shiva, her arms from Vishnu, her feet from Brahma, her hair from Yama, her waist from Indra, and so on through every god, so that she was the power of all of them at once and more than any of them. The text does not say she was created. It says she appeared; the gods only lent their light.
The weapons given by the gods
Then each god gave her his own weapon, and the list in the Devi Mahatmya is worth knowing, because every arm of a Durga image holds one of these gifts.
- Shiva drew a trident from his own trident and gave it to her.
- Vishnu gave a discus from his discus.
- Varuna gave a conch, and also a noose.
- Agni gave a spear, which in Sanskrit is itself called a shakti.
- Vayu gave a bow and two quivers of arrows.
- Indra gave his thunderbolt, and a bell from his elephant Airavata.
- Yama gave his staff, the rod of time.
- Brahma gave a rosary and a water-pot.
- Surya placed his rays in every pore of her skin.
- Kala, time itself, gave a sword and shield.
- The ocean of milk gave her garments, jewels and a garland that never fades.
- Vishvakarma, the divine craftsman, gave an axe and armour.
- Himavat, the Himalaya, gave her a lion to ride.
The meaning is plain once you see it. Each god gave what was his to give, and none held back. Shakti is what happens when every power acts together towards one end. The weapons are not hers because she took them; they are hers because they were always hers, lent out for a while and now returned.
The battle and the lion
The Goddess laughed, and her laugh shook the worlds. Mahishasura's armies came at her and she cut them down. Then the demon himself came, and here the story becomes a lesson in the nature of evil. Mahishasura would not hold one shape. He fought as a buffalo; when wounded he became a lion, then a man with a sword, then an elephant, then a buffalo again. Evil shifts; it changes its argument the moment it is losing. The Goddess leaps onto the buffalo, pins him with her foot and strikes him with her spear. As the demon in his own form begins to climb out of the buffalo's mouth, she beheads him. Every Durga image shows this exact moment: the buffalo's severed neck, the man emerging, the lion's jaws on the buffalo's flank. From it she takes the name Mahishasuramardini, crusher of the buffalo demon.
The battle is remembered over the nine nights of Navaratri, and the tenth day, Vijaya Dashami, is the day of victory.
The lion is the Goddess's vahana, her vehicle, and vehicles in Hindu iconography always say something about the rider. The lion is raw power: appetite, aggression, pride, the kingly energy that the Sanskrit tradition calls rajas. The Goddess does not kill it and does not deny it. She sits on it. Power that would be destructive on its own becomes, under her, the force that carries dharma into battle. In Gujarat and much of the Himalayan north she is often shown on a tiger instead, and the meaning is the same.
Shakti behind creation
In the third story of the Devi Mahatmya, when the demon Shumbha taunts the Goddess for relying on the help of other goddesses, she withdraws them all into her own body and declares that she alone exists in this world, and that the others were only her own powers taking form. This is the philosophical heart of the text. Lakshmi, Saraswati, Kali, Parvati, the village goddess at the end of the lane: they are not rival deities but one Shakti seen from different sides. Prakriti, the whole of nature, is her body. Maya, the power that makes the one appear as many, is her play.
A Shakta would go further and say that the gods themselves, and the devotee reading these words, are nothing but Shakti looking at herself.
To reflect on
When Bengali families rise before dawn on Mahalaya to hear the Chandi recited, they are not only hearing a story about a demon. They are reminding themselves that power is sacred, that it belongs to the whole and not to the individual, and that its right use is protection. During the next Navaratri, try keeping one question beside the fast and the garba and the new clothes: what power has been lent to me, and what am I doing with it? The gods gave their weapons without being asked twice. That is the devotion the Goddess asks of us too.