The Nine Nights

For most of the festival year, the Goddess shares the calendar. She appears at Vasant Panchami as Saraswati, she is invoked at the spring Navaratri that climbs to Rama’s birth, she stands behind a hundred local observances. But once a year, in the autumn, the tradition turns to her entirely. For nine nights everything else steps back, and the year tells one story: how, when every god had failed, the Goddess took the field.

It is the story of a power that exists because the gods admitted they were not enough.

The demon none could kill

The story is the Devi Mahatmya, the Glory of the Goddess, a text embedded in the Markandeya Purana and dated by scholars to around the fifth or sixth century of the Common Era, the first text in the tradition to gather the scattered goddesses into a single supreme Goddess and to declare her the highest reality. F. Eden Pargiter’s translation of 1904 carries it in the public domain.

The demon was Mahishasura, the buffalo-demon. He had won, through long austerity, a boon that the tradition keeps returning to: that no man and no god could kill him. He had asked, in his cunning, only against males, against men and gods, certain that nothing else could threaten him. Armoured by the boon, he made war on heaven and won. The gods were driven from their own realm, scattered and powerless, and there was nothing any of them, singly, could do. Vishnu could not kill him. Shiva could not kill him. Indra, king of the gods, could not.

So they did the only thing left. They gave up acting alone.

The Devi Mahatmya describes what happened when the defeated gods gathered. From the face of each, in their fury, a great light poured out, and the lights streamed together and fused into a single blaze, a mountain of fire brighter than any of them, and from that gathered radiance the Goddess took form. She was made of all of them and was greater than all of them. Each god armed her: Shiva gave his trident, Vishnu his discus, Vayu his bow, each power surrendering its weapon into her many hands. She was not one more god added to the failed assembly. She was what they became when they stopped competing and poured themselves into one.

The nine nights of battle

Mounted on a lion, the Goddess went out against Mahishasura, and the battle is the nine nights.

He came against her in his shifting forms, now a buffalo, now a lion, now a man, now a great beast again, changing shape to escape her, and through the nights she pursued him through every form. The Devi Mahatmya is unflinching about the violence, the armies destroyed, the demon-generals felled one after another, the Goddess laughing in the fight. And on the tenth day, the buffalo-demon cornered in his true form, she pinned him with her foot and drove the trident through him and ended him. For this she is Mahishasuramardini, the crusher of Mahisha, and it is in this form, lion beneath her, trident in the demon’s chest, that she is shown across the festival.

The text does not let the Goddess be only a warrior. It names her as the ground of everything. In the gods’ great hymn of praise she is called Durga, the one by whom beings are ferried across the hard ocean of worldly existence, the boat over the sea of birth and death. She is the destroyer of the demon and she is the refuge of what is lost, terror to evil and shelter to the faithful at once. The nine nights hold both faces, the slayer and the mother, and refuse to separate them.

One festival, many keepings

How the nine nights are kept depends entirely on where they are kept, and Navaratri is one of the clearest cases in the whole treatise of a single festival lived in radically different ways.

In Bengal and across the east, the last days of Navaratri become Durga Puja, the supreme festival of the year. Great clay images of Durga slaying Mahishasura, the Goddess with her ten arms and her children around her, are sculpted over weeks, installed in pandals, elaborate temporary pavilions that can become vast works of art and architecture, and worshipped through the final days before they are carried in roaring procession to the river and immersed. The Bengali tradition keeps a particular note: the autumn worship of Durga is the Akalbodhan, the untimely invocation, for the tradition tells, in the Bengali Ramayana of Krittivasa, that Rama himself invoked the Goddess out of season, in autumn rather than spring, before his battle with Ravana, and so opened the autumn worship the east has kept ever since.

In the south, the same nine nights are often kept as Golu, a tiered display of dolls and figures set up in the home, gods and saints and scenes and whole miniature worlds arranged on steps, visited from house to house. In Gujarat the festival is danced: the Garba, the circling dance around a lamp or an image of the Goddess, and the Dandiya, the dance of striking sticks, kept night after night for the nine nights. Many keep the festival as a cycle of nine forms of the Goddess, the Navadurga, and a widespread scheme gives three nights each to the Goddess as Durga the remover of negativity, as Lakshmi the giver of abundance, and as Saraswati the giver of knowledge, so that the worshipper passes through power, wealth, and wisdom across the nine nights.

The same Goddess, the same nine nights, the same victory. Clay images in the east, dolls in the south, dance in the west. The treatise gives them all as one festival with many true keepings, and ranks none above the others.

What the gathering means

It is worth lingering on the shape of the founding story, because it carries the festival’s deepest teaching. The demon could not be beaten by any god alone. He was beaten only when the gods stopped acting as rivals and poured everything they had into a single form greater than the sum of them. The Goddess is what the gathered powers become. She is concentration itself, the scattered made one.

This is why the autumn festival of the Goddess gathers people the way it does, the whole community sculpting and dancing and feasting together for nine nights. The festival enacts its own story. A power that no one possesses alone appears when the many become one. The pandal built by a whole neighbourhood, the dance of a hundred circling figures, the dolls visited from house to house: the festival is a gathering, and the Goddess at its centre was born from a gathering.

For nine nights she fights. On the tenth, she wins.

And the tenth day opens the year’s great season of victory and light, the festivals that answer the gathering dark with fire.