Like in most myths, the gods do fight a lot among themselves. So maybe according to the Hindu lunar calendar, the territories have been well marked so everyone can live in peace. There is no need to go to war like the men.

By now we have come to acknowledge that Parvati, in her avatar as Mother Durga, is most revered in Bengal as a daughter who visits her family for a few days with her four children in tow. She comes to a warmer place where she gets the well-reserved rest from the icy winds of Mount Kailash. There her husband, Lord Shiva, is king, while Shiva is a good-for-nothing guy in Bengal and some parts of north India. In these parts, he is totally domesticated. He tries to be of some help to the house when not absconding!

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Bengal’s presiding deity, however, is Ma Kali. She is all powerful. So even if Kali is worshipped during Diwali or Dipannita, as we say in Bengal, not only in a mandap or temples but in a few homes too, Ma Lakshmi is no less an important deity.

Through the writings on the subject of Hindu worship by Jawhar Sircar, erudite scholar and former Rajya Sabha member, we learn that Lakshmi Puja in Bengal and much of the East, comprising Assam, Odisha and Tripura, is about invoking Lakshmi on the full moon day of the lunar month of Ashwin. Just a week after Durga puja, on Kojagori Purnima—as this full moon day is known in Bengal—Lakshmi comes home. While the North and West of India worship Lakshmi Puja a little later, on the darkest moon night of that fortnight, it is Diwali, which fills up the whole world with a million lamps in the dark. Amavasya. It is a day when Bengalis and other neighbouring cultures worship the darkest goddess, Kali, during the pitch black, moonless night.

“South India has a different tradition of worshipping. The goddess Lakshmi is worshipped during three of the nine nights of Navaratri, which ends just five days before. This is how diversity has thrived amidst unity in India for several millennia,” he writes.

The east Bengali Hindus did the same though many in western Bengal, especially the ‘ghotis’ and some families that were originally from north India, worship Deep Lakshmi on Diwali or Dipannita. It is believed that olokkhi (bad luck) and poverty are driven out and Lakshmi, or Lokkhi, enters the houses.

Again, in the words of Jawhar Sircar, “Even so, the fact that all community Durga Puja pandals in West Bengal retain their structures for worshipping Lakshmi during Kojagori Purnima shows that though this date for Lakshmi Puja may have originated from East Bengal, it is quite universal now.”

Apart from a good harvest, another theory about Kojagori Lakshmi Puja has it that traders from the Gangetic West Bengal in the past took advantage of the retreating monsoon winds (since the dates vary between September and October) to ply their boats and ships to Burma, Indonesia, and therefore, they prayed to Goddess Lakshmi a fortnight before Diwali/Kali Puja. The full moon has a bearing on the tidal waves. “These helped to launch the merchandise-laden ships from the various creeks,” says senior journalist Jayanta Roy Chowdhury. He is quick to point out it is just one of the theories because the merchants of Sonargaon, an important textile region of East Bengal, did not follow this tradition.

It is also Thanksgiving time after a good harvest, and though the dates may overlap between cultures, this full moon is often called the Harvest Moon in the West. And why does the owl feature as a vahan for Ma Lakshmi?

The popular belief is that the owls eat the rats preying on the granary, storing the grains after a good harvest. After all, ours was and is still majorly an agrarian society, though the worship in the towns and cities reflects a certain symbolism of wealth and prosperity. It throws light on an ecosystem whereby the owl ate up the mice, the mice devoured lesser insets, and so on in the food chain.

As for the equivalent of Lakshmi, often compared with Goddess Minerva in Greco-Roman mythology, that story is best left for another day. Here’s wishing our readers a prosperous life ahead.

The writer is as senior journalist