This year too Durga Pujas have come back to hammer home the age old adage: What Bengal thinks today the rest of India thinks tomorrow.
In what could work as a clement balm to soothe a communally polarised atmosphere, organisers of northern Kolkata Durga Puja club have decided to walk off the beaten track. This, by worshiping a Muslim girl as “Kumari” during the Maha Navami day Kanya pujan.
The idea breaks the tradition but is not new in itself. Rather it is an encore of what Swami Vivekananda did in 1998 by worshipping the daughter of a Muslim boatman as “Kumari” at the famous Kheer Bhavani Temple when he was travelling Kashmir.
This year around the Mritika Club of New Town has selected Nafisa, a girl, as their Kumari who will be worshipped as Mother Goddess human form on the Maha Navami Day.
“We have chosen Nafisa whose mother works in the house of one of us …there is no better way to acknowledge divinity in a person … a divinity that manifests itself through the “Kumari,” says one of the organizers.
“We are inspired by Swami ji … who has often been narrowly misinterpreted as a Hindu icon. No. Not really! He was an incarnation of one of the Saptarshis (seven sages or stars in the sky): a saint born with the elements of Rudra. Inspired by his master Sri Ramakrishna Paramahansa, himself born with the attributes of Lord Rama and Krishna, Swami ji was a champion of Sarva Dharma Samanwaya (unity of religions) … imagine the kind of wisdom, power, knowledge, guts and intellect a person born in an obscurantist age needed to break the hard-line traditions by worshipping a Muslim girl,” an organizer of the Mrittika Club women’s committee said.
“If Swami ji could worship a Muslim girl more than a century ago, why can’t we do it now?” says Pratham Mukherjee, secretary of the Mritika Club.
Although Muslim families and youth of many parts of Bengal especially Kolkata’s minority dominated areas have been participating enthusiastically in Durga Pujas, this will be the first time that a girl from the community is being worshiped as a living goddess.
Muslim priest Haji Illyas at Alimuddin Street hailed the effort: “In this time of provocations such affection … such efforts for communal amity should be appreciated.”