DURGA

D urga is not born — she is summoned. In the Devi Mahatmya, when the buffalo-demon Mahishasura has driven the gods from the heavens and no single deity can return him to defeat, the gathered light (tejas) of every god combines, and from that light a warrior-goddess steps into the world.

Each god gives her a weapon — Shiva his trident, Vishnu his discus, Indra his thunderbolt — until she carries the collective armoury of the cosmos. She rides a lion. She has eight arms (or ten, or eighteen, depending on which telling you read). She meets Mahishasura on the battlefield and ends what no one else could finish.

In Shakti, The Legends of Sherawali, we follow this story through the eyes of a nine-year-old girl named Athena, far from home in Kolkata during Durga Puja, hearing it for the first time inside the workshop of a sculptor preparing the goddess’s idol for the festival.

The film treats her with the reverence she is owed by the tradition that named her — rendered in the language of cinema, but carried by the iconography of the Shakta scriptures.