The method of chanting the name of durga and the benefits of chanting it according to the rudra yamala tantra as said by lord shiva to parvati.

Durga, as this powerful warrior-goddess is known, Has nine special forms-each one unique, not just a clone. Shailaputri, Brahmacharini and Chandraghanta, Kushmanda and Skandamata, Katyayani and Kaalratri, Maha Gauri and Siddhidatri . . . They are the Nava Durga, Worshipped during Navaratri, The festival of nine nights and nine days That's celebrated across India and the world in myriad ways To praise the goddesses and their glory. This is their story!

Each year, Kolkata's Durga Puja scales new heights as the most spectacular and extravagant event in the city's calendar. From the turn of the twenty-first century, the festival has taken on a particular artistic dispensation that is unique to the contemporary city, demanding a new order of attention and analysis. Based on field-research conducted between 2002 and 2012, this book unravels the anatomy of this newly-congured 'art' event, by tracking the new production processes, the mounting trends of publicity and sponsorship as well as the practices of mass spectatorship that make for the transformed visual culture of the festival. This new visual aesthetic, it is argued, has become the most important marker of the rapidly mutating identity of today's Durga Puja in Kolkata, bringing into the fray new categories of artists and designers, new genres of public art, and new spaces for art production and reception in the city. The book's central concern lies in conceptualizing a specically contemporary and artistic history of the urban festival. In keeping with its title, the book examines the diversity of images and practices - from the consumerist spectacle and the bonanza of awards to the efflorescence of public installations and art and craft productions - that unfurls in this season 'in the name of the goddess'. While proling the Durga Pujas as Kolkata's biggest public art event, the book also addresses the ambivalence of the designations of 'art' and 'artist' in this eld of production and viewership. One of the main aims of this study has been to lay open the claims of 'art' in this festival both as a set of insistent projections as well as a mesh of incomplete formations. The new artistic nomenclature of the festival, it is shown, is not easily secured and has to struggle to assert itself within the body of the religious event and the ephemeral mass spectacle.

This book of essays has no agenda - either gender or religious - but discusses the many facets of the Goddess Durga's images and worship on the Indian subcontinent. The nine authors (in keeping with Navaratri) belong to both the East and West, and to four religions: Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist and Christian. The ten essays like the ten armsof the great goddess in her Bengali manifestation cannot possibly be all-encompassing but does cover the physical geography of the subscontinent by including discussions of her presence and prevalence in Nepal and Kashmir, in Baluchistan, TamilNadu and Keral, and of course, in West Bengal, especially Kolkata, where her autumn festival is celebrated annualy.