You are entitled to Navratri, please leave our Durga Puja alone

Durga Puja or, as we Bengalis refer to it, Pujo, is perhaps the most anticipated time of the year. It's a celebration of grand proportions as 'Ma' Durga comes to visit her familial home, children in tow, after spending the rest of the year at her husband's.

Over the years, numerous traditions have become as revered as the goddess herself. Putting on new clothes, pandal-hopping to see the goddess reimagined in a hundred different ways, sitting around the Maddox Square (Ballygunge, Kolkata) pandal grounds and catching up with friends... And of course, food.

While the rest of the country celebrates Navratri, and maintains a vegetarian diet, Pujo, for the average Bengali is a time to indulge. Freshly-fried fish cutlets, fluffy egg rolls with their crunchy paratha coverings and salad-and-sauce fillings, and puffed-up luchi and mutton kosha ... These are definitely among the top reasons for us to look forward to this time of the year. And it has been this way for decades.

In the age of digital media, however, nothing is sacred, especially traditions based on good humour. Fortune Foods recently faced a boycott campaign from a Hindutva group for a campaign they brought out in Bengali where a couple is shown eating fish and mutton as is wont during the festival season.

This led to the usual outrage which has become the zeitgeist of our times, where someone takes offence to drum up some publicity. A group called the Hindu Janjagriti Samiti, in all their infinite wisdom, felt that eating non-veg food during Navratri was sacrilegious and demanded that the ad be pulled down.

Following this, the brand sent out a public apology and pulled down the ad – and Bengalis of different vintages let out an exasperated sigh.

Perhaps because this incident reminds us of last year's Jawed Habib fiasco where an ad showing Ma Durga and her children waiting at a salon, which came out in a Bengali daily, read by a Bengali audience, got flak from overzealous and self-proclaimed defenders of the faith, who forced an apology from the hair salon chain.

And perhaps because the target audience – the Bengali middle-class family – would have preferred if Fortune Foods didn't capitulate and apologise for something they had no reason to be sorry.

While the rest of the country revers the goddess from afar, for Bengalis, Ma Durga, the mother, the warrior goddess, is a part of the family. She is a part of the very household, respected and loved but never feared.

So, when we crack jokes about Her, it is as we would crack one on our own mothers – with loving warmth. Secondly, there are no restrictions on food around Durga Puja, it is a time of worship, sure. But more than that, it is a time for family, a time for forgetting barriers and coming together to celebrate the beauty of autumn, with flowers blooming and clear blue sky, a time to welcome the goddess home, and then send her off in style on Dashami, often with tears in eyes. Can anyone really call this spirit disrespect?

While Navratri is a festival to be revered and respected in its own right, it's time to extend that understanding to Durga Puja as well.

The beauty of the Hindu faith and perhaps one of the primary reasons it has survived for millennia and numerous conquerors is it’s inclusive and syncretic nature.

Perhaps, instead of trolling a part of the country's culture for being different than the majority, maybe it's time to try and understand it. We are a country filled with diversities, rich in our cultural differences. It is time we embraced all parts of ourselves instead of trying to fight. After all, we are all siblings worshipping the same mother.

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