Oil painting on canvas.
Bengal - 1890

The painting depicts the return of the goddess Devi Agamani (Uma or Durga), who is shown jewelled and crowned in the distinctive Bengali form, with tall pointed headgear. She is seated on a lotus saddle-cover and rides on her lion 'vahana', or animal mount. She is greeted by her father Himavant, who is dressed in royal attire and advances towards her. The goddess carries in her lap her child, elephant-headed Ganesha, whose diminutive arms are held out towards his grandfather in a mirror gesture of greeting. To the left and behind Himavant, but full of emotion at the moment of welcome, is Uma's mother. She takes up the traditionally correct position indicating that - at least in the public domain - she is secondary in importance to her husband. Hovering in the doorway yet further behind are other members of the household, flanked by plantains, auspicious garlanded pots and fluttering mango leaves over the lintel, all indications of good fortune and welcome. One of these attendants carries a yak-tail fly-whisk, while another appears to blow on a conch, also a sign of welcome. The other figure in the foreground is dark-skinned Nandikeshvara, Śiva's bull mount in human form. He accompanies his lord's wife on her journey from Mount Kailash to her parents' home. Finally, at a quite different scale, in the upper right-hand corner of the painting, three of the other subsidiary figures of the Durga Puja are depicted. Flying on their bird mounts are the deities - from left to right, Lakshmi on her owl, Sarasvati on her swan and Karttikeya on his peacock - all descending to earth to take part in the Puja of the goddess, who in Bengal is considered to be their mother. These three deities, along with Ganesha, are traditionally shown as accompanying Durga in the Puja tableaux, which are the most obvious public manifestation of this festival. Their Georgian-style mansion is seen behind, in the door-way of which stand other women of the household.

Curator's comments
Blurton 2006:
In this form, Durga is thought of as the daughter of Himavant and Menaka, the presiding deities of the Himalayas (Parvati literrally means 'daughter of the mountain') Her poignant story mirrors that of many Bengali women and their family relationships, especially in past centuries. Uma, we learn from the poetry sung at the time of her arrival for the Puja (she is also, of course, at the same time martial Durga), was married young to the frightening, though no doubt exciting, Shiva, also lord of a mountain, that of Kailash far to the west of Bengal. He is known to be a drug-crazed ne'er-do-well, who leads poor young Uma a sorry dance; there is even present in the palace Shiva's second wife, the river goddess Ganga, with whom Uma has to cohabit; Menaka is horrified that her darling daughter has to suffer so. Far away in Kailash, Uma is separated from her loving family and the city that they rule over. Only once a year is the family reunited at the time of the Durga Puja, when Uma is honoured in a rather different form as the victorious goddess who defeats the buffalo-demon. The early separation from her family that Uma has to undergo, marrying an older and dissolute man (child-marriage was the norm for many girls up to the beginning of the twentieth century), is reflected in a haunting song from rural Bengal recorded at the beginning of the twentieth century by the folklore scholar Dineshchandra Sen and commented on by him as follows (note the inevitable imagery of the river):
<>. (Sen, "Folk Literature of Bengal", p. 257)
Each year the days of the Durga Puja are recognized as the time when Bengali families are reunited. This was especially so in the past when the daughters of the house, who for the rest of the year were separated from their natal home, returned for a few days of loving reunion. The story of Durga returning to Bengal from her Himalayan home of Mount Kailash is made more tender by the fact that in eastern India Shiva is frequently presented not only as a powerful ascetic and a cosmic force but also as a penniless and worthless wanderer, who for most of the year makes his wife's life difficult and uncomfortable on account of his drunken and dissolute lifestyle. He is frequently depicted in paintings from the Kalighat shrine with eyeballs disappearing beneath his eyelids, indicating his intoxicated state. Durga's release for a few days into the doting care of her parents in the beautiful and luxuriant land of the Ganges delta is thus one full of delight and is a subject found in the repertoire of the Kalighat painters. The emotion engendered by the welcome, the 'agamani', given to the goddess on her return to Bengal, and then the concomitant and inevitably unhappy end of her time of visiting, the 'vijaya' (literally, 'victory' of the goddess over the buffalo-demon but also indicating the end of her 'mission' for the whole year), constitute an important and symmetrical part of the whole Puja. Indeed, today, the arrival of the goddess is announced over the airwaves through the recitation of poems of welcome and devotion. This takes place before dawn on the first day of the Puja, known as 'Mahalaya', and is so popular that tapes and CDs of this heartfelt chant are sold in great numbers each year. When the goddess finally leaves at the end of the Puja, her devotees line the streets and sorrowfully say goodbye, calling on her to come again next year and bless their lives once more with her presence.

The rich vein of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry that is used to welcome the goddess is mirrored in this painting. Here the moment of return to beloved Bengal is depicted as told in myth and in poetry. Ganesha's presence here is appropriate - even essential - as his presence blesses this Puja. He is the remover of all obstacles to new projects and the guarantor of auspiciousness. This painting not only tells the pacific, familial part of the Durga Puja story but indicates that fascinating conjunction of Indian subject matter and European technique so typical of Bengal in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The traditional medium of painting in the subcontinent - small-scale watercolour imaging on paper - has been abandoned in favour of the European style of oil paint on canvas. Further, the concepts of a distant and receding horizon, and the concomitant of perspective and differential size depending on distance from the viewer, have been used. However, the artist has not applied the rules of perspective in their entirety, as the depiction of the late Georgian architecture of the mansion, to which the goddess is being welcomed, demonstrates. For, while it reflects some of the magnificent buildings of eighteenth-century Calcutta (it was not known as the City of Palaces for nothing), the artist has included more of the building than would strictly have been possible, had he been forced to present it within the strict rules of perspective. The Indian system of showing a building in multiple forms - plan, elevation and even section all in the same painting - sometimes has many advantages when a complete view is desired (the later realization of this same fact by Cubist painters in Europe was probably unconnected with the Indian tradition). Finally, the way in which both the mountain and the woodland landscapes have been visualized suggests alpine scenes in Germany and Switzerland, printed depictions of which had found wide currency in India in the late nineteenth century and probably formed the basis of such views, rather than anything that might have been personally experienced by the Bengali artist.

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