Tome And Plume: Cosmic Mother Is Worshipped In MP For Over 2300 Years

Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh): It is the Divine Mother who exists in the form of the universe and pervades everything as Consciousness – Ramakrishna Paramhansa

The Shardiya Navratri festival is underway in Bhopal. The idols of Goddess Durga have been installed in hundreds of pandals in the city, which reverberate with the hymns chanted from Durga Saptashati, a religious book, in the morning and in the evening. 

The history of worshipping the idols of Goddess Durga in Madhya Pradesh takes us back to the Mauryan era and even before that period when people used to make her idols and worship them.

Two of her 2,300-year-old idols, belonging to this period, were found in Ninore in Sehore, nearly 56 km from the state capital, during an excavation from 1994 to 1996. The idol has 12 arms.

The idols, found in Ninore, are two inches tall and 12-cm-long, six-cm- wide and one-cm thick. Several scholars of Indian iconography, including NP Joshi, have spoken about these idols.

Many ancient sculptures of Mahishasurmardini were also found in Hinglajgarh, Mandsaur district of MP, which belong to the Gupta and the Paramar periods, respectively.

Thus, the seeds of all the pandals and lights that come up during the Shardiya Navratri were sown thousands of years ago in the state, and the Sharda temple in Maihar is one of the examples of it.

As we open the pages of the Arthashastra, we find Chanakya speaking about Goddess Aparajita, a form of Goddess Durga. He says the goddess Aparajita should be worshipped in the fort to protect a city.

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According to some scholars, the name of Goddess Durga is associated with Durg, or a fort, so Chanakya’s Arthashastra gives us the clue behind the name of the goddess whose idols were found in the fort of Hinglajgarh.

Aparajita also means 'undefeatable female power', which is none other than Goddess Durga. Some scholars have always debated over if Goddess Durga’s idol is like Bactrian Goddess Nana. Yes, there are certain similarities between Nana and Durga.

Nana, the patron deity of the Kushan empire, was associated with war, fertility, wisdom, and power. The story of Goddess Nana, or Nanaya, may have originated from Mesopotamia in the early part of the second millennium BCE. In the early part of the CE, emperor Kanishka-I worshipped Goddess Nana in India, and her busts can be found on the coins of the Kushan period.

Nana was occasionally shown with four arms, holding four weapons. So, a few scholars of Indian iconography have ferreted out some similarities between Nana and Durga.

In the Narmada Valley, a cradle of human civilisation, the oldest-known idols of Goddess Durga were found. Mandsaur, too, was an ancient place where statues of the goddess were worshipped.

The history of the idol of Goddess Durga also traces some links with another Mesopotamian goddess, Innana. Both goddesses have been delineated seated on a lion or a tiger, the symbol of power. According to historians, Innana has eight stars that symbolise the ten hands of Mahishasura Mardini, or Durga.

The ancient Mesopotamians had trade and cultural exchanges with the inhabitants of the Indus Valley, which may have been the reason behind the similarities between the idol of Durga and that of Inanna.

Yet, there is a difference between them because Goddess Inanna symbolises fertility and material power, but Durga is an epitome of divine power, wisdom, blessings, and justice, whose worship liberates a soul from the cycle of birth and death. She is Moksha Datri (liberator of the human soul), who even frees the demon king, Mahishasura, from his cursed life after destroying him. Ergo, Mahishasura is also worshipped and offered food together with the goddess, who is also called Mahamaya because mere utterance of her name from the bottom of the heart clears all illusions.