The Eternal Homecoming: Durga, Memory and the Wounds of Bengali

Some figurines become more real than history itself, slipping into the marrow of collective memory and transcending myths.

- BIDISHA GHOSH

Durga, in the cultural imagination of Bengal, is less a deity frozen in the hieratic sanctity of temples than she is a daughter, eternally itinerant, eternally returning. She travels back to her mother’s house every year, and in that brief interlude of festivity the Bengali household—regardless of creed or class—reenacts the primordial unfolding of homecoming. The Bengali heart is strongly moved by Durga’s delicate human portrayal as Uma, the daughter who returns for her annual sojourn before departing again into absence, rather than by the goddess’ cosmic triumph over the asura. Durga is not just a goddess of power; she is also the eternal migrant of Bengali societyher story is the story of Bengal’s wounds, its nostalgia, and its quiet resilience. Her footsteps echo through novels and films, through oral histories and rituals, through the tears of loss and the stubborn grace of endurance.

The figure of the returning daughter maps seamlessly onto the lived experience of women in Bengal-where marriage has historically entailed a rupture, a crossing over into another household, often another geography. Just as the goddess’s image, radiant and resplendent, is destined to be submerged in the river's current, the daughter who returns home for a few days bears the ache of leaving , behind a facade of laughter.

The Goddess Seeks Refuge

When Bengal was cleaved in 1947, a single demarcation on the map was no less than a bruise being scratched again, making it bleed again this time, in deliberation. Ancestral homes turned into ashes overnight, and villages into painful memoirs. Carrying only a bundle of clothing, a key to a house that no longer stood and the intangible weight of uprooted belonging, millions of people trudged across a divided land. Durga’s own yearly departure and return took on a terrifying poignancy amid this turmoil. Was she not a migrant as well, joyfully arriving at her parents’