 "Lords of the little: Pujo for its makers")
It is the evening of Vijayadashami and, like all other Delhi Durgas, Asheet Manjhi’s Durga Maa is on her way back to Kailash, via the Yamuna. Manjhi’s half-a-foot terracotta goddess (and her entire family), is travelling by the Delhi Metro. At the Yamuna Bank Metro station, she will meet a few more mini goddesses, and they will together join their colossal cousins in marching off into the sea of people flocking to the Yamuna’s banks.
While you hardly notice these little Durgas, or the small knots of people coming to see them off, they have their own special place in the yearly mahotsav. In Delhi, these little ones are goddesses to the makers of the Pujo themselves.
Asheet Manjhi is a street peddler, and he sells clay gods and goddesses. On a typical working day, one can find on his cart several terracotta Lakshmi-Ganeshas, Shivas, Radha-Krishnas and an assortment of other deities. Durga is seasonal. She is larger and costlier than most others. And she sells less, too. “The Dashabhuja sells for anything between Rs 250 and Rs 350 apiece. There is not much variation in sizes, either. Other gods and goddesses range from tiny to as much as four or five feet high. Their price range is also wide — it can go up to Rs 5,000,” says Manjhi. In spite of this, Asheet orders at least three Durgas every year. Two are for his customers, and one for his family.
“There is a lady who buys a Durga from me every year. At least one more would invariably sell to someone. Anything more than that depends on whether I have any orders in advance.” These extra orders usually fund the Manjhi family’s Durga puja, which stays confined to a small corner of their rented flat in the Hauz Rani area of Malviya Nagar in South Delhi.
There are others like the Manjhis. Binoy, Ashish and Bijoy sell flowers and garlands to devotees all the year around, sitting at different places in and around Chittaranjan Park markets, usually close to the Kaalibari temple or the Market-1 Kaali temple. During the Pujos, even as their business is at its busiest, they make it a point to pool in their resources and bring home a tiny terracotta Durga idol every year. “Earlier, we used to divide our shifts in these busy days, and visit the pandals with our families, sometimes in the morning and sometimes at night. For the past few years, we bring our own little Durga home. It can get difficult, but we think it boosts our business for the rest of the year, brings good luck and goodwill to the families.”
But how do they manage? “We stay very busy during these days, and it’s the women of the house who take care of all the rituals. It is their Pujo, actually,” says Binoy.
Similar is the case with Dashakarma shop owners, who often conduct the annual Pujo through a system of resource pooling. A peculiarity of most Bengali markets, Dashakarma shops specialise only in materials needed for various pujos and rituals. Chittaranjan Park has several such shops across its four markets. There are a few in Malviya Nagar, Saket and Lajpat Nagar as well. While the owners of these shops have a roaring business during this period of the year, they also keep immensely busy. Bharat Sen (name changed on request), a Dashakarma shop owner in Chittaranjan Park Market-1, says: “Pooling of resources not only considerably brings down the cost but also helps us balance our work with festivities.”
Sen says, usually the shopkeepers keep aside a part of their budget for the year’s pujo stock for their own use. If the resources are pooled across five or six such shops, the share of each shopkeeper reduces to amounts which will not be harmful for the season’s profit. In fact, the shopkeepers would categorise and assign the pujo-samagri among themselves. While one would get only the food products, another would arrange incense, fire-wood, oils, ointments, etc. Sen says he is looking after the cloth-based items this year.
Sen’s small group of friends and fellow shopkeepers who jointly conduct the Pujo every year, also includes small-time makers of sweetmeats, flower-sellers and incense sellers who have recently come to Delhi from small villages of Bihar and West Bengal, and need to send a major part of their small incomes to their families back home. Sometimes, they might need to travel back during the Pujo. In such cases, a share of what is collected in terms of surplus funds or dakshina is used to fund their Pujo plans. “They pay these back, or don’t, depending on their resources. We don’t expect anything back”, says Sen.
Unlike the major pandal-based Pujo celebrations, which more often turn into corporate fairs with involvement of heavyweight sponsors, these little Pujos — little, literally, because of the size of their idols — are homely affairs aimed at bonding as a community, praying for a collective prosperity, and, as Binoy puts it, thanking goddess Dashabhuja for initiating the most prosperous time of their year.
As she drifts away swiftly into the waters of the Yamuna, Manjhi and his family walk back with moist eyes. Their Durga might seem invisible when compared with her colossal sisters, but the pinch of parting is perhaps equally pronounced. From tomorrow, Manjhi will be back on the road selling the departed goddess’ identical twins, and waiting for the next Pujo.
