This description of a Hindu religious festival was published in the seminal anthology Annales Romantiques in 1833, and bears witness to the early avant-garde’s attempts to engage meaningfully with Eastern religion. Like most such attempts, it fails to fully escape a Eurocentric perspective. Its author Bouzenot [pronounce: Booze-e-know] was a young Romanticist philosopher, Liberal social theorist, and historian of thought whose experimental essay veers into list-poetry recalling Rabelais’ medieval satirical lists and looks forward to those of the Surrealists and otherstream poets. Here he compares a Hindu festival to the local traditional festivals (often with Pagan roots) familiar to French readers. The exercise in comparative religion manages to make a nod, both in content and style, to each of the main strains within ultra-Romanticism at the time: the Orientalist, Medievalist, and Frenetic tendencies. The autumn festival being described is Durga Puja, dedicated to the benevolent maternal war-deity Durga. Local versions of the festival are celebrated across Eastern and north-eastern India. The broad outlines of the festival as described here seem fairly accurate.
The Durga (1834)
by Auguste Bouzenot
translated by Olchar E. Lindsann
It’s safe to say there are few families so negligent of time-honoured customs and paternal festivals, as not to elect in the chapel of Notre-Dame, on December 26, the day of St. Stephen, ancient patron of that chapel, a bishop of fools from among the sub-deacons, or rather as uncouth tongues would say, the drunk deacons of the cathedral.
Not to appropriately celebrate on the first of January the festival of fools, by causing old shoes to be burned in a censer and forcing the bishop to inhale this noxious odour;
Not to chow down on the cake of kings at the epiphany,
Not to march on Fat Thursday alongside the veiled, violated, violed ox,
Not to go watch the giant set aflame in the Rue aux Ours,
The wicker dragon of Notre-Dame, the day of Rogation,
The gaping maw of the good St. Vermin in Poitiers,
The growlie at Metz,
The gargoyle in Rouen,
The tarasque in Tarascon,
The salted chair in Troyes,
A Goliath or a Ferrand made of straw on Ash Wednesday and so many other dragons, that of the Rock of Turpin, that of St. André, that of St. Bernard de Comminges;
Not to lend a hand at the University’s festival of fools.
At the bonfire of St. Jean [Cathedral] and at that of St. Pierre,
At the festival of the ass,
At the festival of the abbot of cuckolds,
At the festival of kalends,
At the festival of idiots,
At the festival of the abbot of the peanut gallery,
At the festival of the innocents,
And other revelries said to be barbarities;
Not to crack walnuts in St. Michel,
Send love-knots in St. Valentin,
Not to… not to…
Not to hurl one’s durga into the Ganges in the great festival of August 25.
The Hindus have in general religiously preserved the dogmas and rites of Brahma. Nor is he truly faithful who does not piously preserve his domestic gods, gods of the mat where he finds his repose, gods of the weapons which serve to repel his enemies, god of his hearth always welcoming to the stranger. Everybody has his idol in the most appropriate part of the house, everybody has his great gods uncannily decked out with the head of a crocodile, serpent or cow, with the stout plug on the chief, elegantly multicoloured, blues, yellows, reds, whites or greens, silent emblems, fantastic, insistent, who grimace marvelously with all of the human emotions, gods of the cradle and the tomb, gods of the young spouse and the old man, of water and fire, faithful friends whom everybody approaches each evening to confide their most secret thoughts quietly in the ear, gods of harvests, who cause to blossom the roses of cashmere and sonebac with which you perfume your hair; splendid gods! indeed.
The festivities begin at the new moon in the month of August and last three days. As soon as the sun on the first day leaps radiantly upon the Ganges’ current, you intone, face against the earth:
Brahma, Brahma, Brahma, the god of evil is powerful, and I myself am small!
Brahma, Brahma, Brahma, the god of evil is powerful, and I myself am small!
Brahma, Brahma, Brahma, the god of evil is powerful, and I myself am small!
Thus you purify the house, you render it white and clean;
You chase off the evil spirit who blows upon the harvest, who casts curses in passing and who the night visits in the gardens to rip away the leaves of magatelli leaves which make the serpents die;
Then the family assembles, you take council, you make prayers together;
Then you don the Durga in rich clothing, in long veils of garlands; your great sword is in its left hand, in the other is the head of the malicious angel. Next commence the lamentations and wailings; you prostrate yourself at the feet of the god, you strike the earth with your brow, you shed many tears; the offerings and prayers rival those of the first two days. The god’s going to have to be abandoned, divine mercy! And you continue to produce a profusion of sobs and of gifts; it’s then that you must set yourself to drying that depthless reservoir of woes that we retain at the root of the soul in order to find nothing but joy from now on. The third day arises.
Ring out, you clarions, trumpets, fanfares, cymbals, bells, tambourines, with forceful clamour, to bear witness to my joy; everything’s mad with pleasure, drunk with ecstasy, everything’s upset, stirred up, thrashed about, twisted. And the orchestra spreads its great flood of music and its uproar of tom-tom tumbling like cataracts, oh! how beautiful it is then, the Ganges, my river of wide banks, of majestic blue waters so transparent! It would be difficult to perceive them overlain as they are by thousands of barges bedecked and mantled in rich array. One would call it an immense robe strewn with clusters of blooms; my variegated barges must be seen, going two by two naught but two, and joined by a moveable plank in the middle of which is the god.
Someone is about to give the signal, listen: it is the high priest in person!
Baren, zamet, fouchi.
And suddenly the boats part from each other, and with the god who vanishes into the waves, with a thousand peals of trumpets, a thousand cries of joy, it’s up to anybody who shall catch some shred of the Dourgha’s garments, some flowers from his garland in order to offer them to it next year.
from Les Annales romantiques: Recueil de morceaux chosis de littérature contemporain, ed. Charles Malo. 1834. Janet: Paris, pp. 30-35.
from the collection of the Revenant Archive.
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