religion-and-observance
Religious practice as lived in Bengal in 1814, kept deliberately separate from the Aeternum Choir's use of it — established in play when Georgiana derived the ritual date.
Overview
The Calcutta chapter turns on a Hindu festival, and this domain exists to keep two things apart that the party will be tempted to collapse together: the observance, which is ordinary and ancient and belongs to the city, and the cult’s parasitism on it, which does not.
Filed here rather than with the clue material because the festival is a fact about the world, not a fact about the Aeternum Choir.
Details
Kali Puja
25 October 1814. A tantric festival of the goddess Kali, kept on the new moon at the end of the monsoon season, coincident with Diwali. As established at the table:
- Rites are performed in darkness, on the new moon
- Worship takes place at cremation grounds
- Observance includes animal sacrifice and offerings of red hibiscus and rice
- It is a festival of the goddess of death, and it is entirely mainstream
Georgiana arrived at the date by cross-referencing the Revelations of Glaaki against the Calcutta Gazette’s weather reports and celestial alignment, working alone overnight on the party’s first night ashore.
Diwali, the same night. Established in play, Chapter 4 Session 10. The new moon of Kartik is also the lamps night. Every wall and rooftop in the city carries small clay lamps, the servants want the evening and money for sweets, there are fireworks till dawn, and the Hooghly fills with floating lights. Meg Cavendish watched it from the compound roof last year and called it the loveliest thing she has seen in India. The drumming from the north went on till morning. She would not go within a mile of it.
Samapti
Samapti means completion, the end. The changed men who walked into the river from the carriage line at Government House were murmuring it, and the priests at Baranagar use it to tell a mother her son has reached completion, with forty rupees for the family (Ram Mohan Roy). The men also murmured “Ma dakchhe”, Mother is calling, the Mother being the goddess.
Evening arti and the household shrine
At dusk the Mandir Mahakali performs the evening arti, the lamp offering, and its Acharya leads it. A Hindu household of standing keeps a shrine in its courtyard, with a Tulsi plant on a plinth and lamps lit in wall niches at nightfall (Ghosh House, Session 15 - The River of Rites and Ruin).