Durga Puja 2026: Date, Tithi, Muhurta & Significance

Durga Puja as Bengal, Assam and Odisha keep it rests on a different telling from the autumn Navratri of the north. Here the story is Akal Bodhon — the "untimely awakening."

The gods sleep through the four months of the monsoon, and Durga with them. By tradition she is invoked in spring, at Basanti Puja. But Rama, facing Ravana with his brother Lakshmana wounded and his army failing, could not wait for spring. He resolved to wake the goddess out of season — an act no one had attempted. He gathered one hundred and eight blue lotuses for the rite, and Ravana, learning of it, hid the final bloom. Rather than leave the worship incomplete, Rama reached for his arrow to offer his own eye, known as the lotus-eyed one. Durga stayed his hand before it fell and appeared before him, won not by the flowers but by the willingness. She granted him the victory that followed on the tenth day.

This is why the goddess is woken in autumn, and why the rite that opens the five days is called Bodhon — the awakening, performed on Shashthi before a bel tree at dusk. Saptami brings the Nabapatrika, nine plants bound together and bathed at the river before first light, the goddess received in the form of vegetation. Ashtami holds Sandhi Puja, the twenty-four minutes spanning the join of Ashtami and Navami, when Durga took the form of Chamunda to kill Chanda and Munda — the most charged moment of the five days. Navami closes the worship with the final arati.

On Dashami the married women of the neighbourhood smear each other with vermilion at Sindoor Khela, the idol is carried to the river, and the goddess who came home for five days returns to Kailash. What follows is Bijoya — the visiting, the embraces, the sweets carried house to house, a farewell conducted as a celebration.