Visions of Shakti: How Artists Across Cultures Channel the Spirit of Durga

The scent of shiuli blossoms, the glow of pandal lights, and the pulse of dhak resonate across Bengal and beyond—Durga Puja 2025 is here. But while the goddess inhabits the clay idols that await immersion in rivers, she also breathes across canvases, paper, bronze, and digital screens. Artists have long invoked her as more than a myth—Durga is power, protector, mother, resistance, and renewal.

This Puja, as we stand before her image, it is worth asking: How have artists imagined Shakti, across India and the world? What stories do their works tell us about our own longing for strength, freedom, and divinity?

Shakti as Cosmic Power & Creation

Durga’s earliest depictions in temple reliefs—such as the Mahishasuramardini panels in Mamallapuram—already show her as the embodiment of supreme cosmic energy. But centuries later, modern Indian artists reinterpreted this primordial power through paint and ink.

Nandalal Bose, a pioneer of the Bengal School, often turned to the goddess not only as myth but as metaphor. His Durga was not a distant celestial figure, but a national mother, embodying Bharat Mata. In his iconic linocuts and posters, the lines are simple, the figure direct—Durga is power that is accessible, almost walking among us.

Bharat Mata by Nandalal Bose

Jamini Roy, with his bold folk-inspired style, stripped Durga of ornamentation and brought her closer to the common people. His Durga paintings, influenced by patachitra, celebrate the goddess in earthy hues—red, ochre, indigo—where almond eyes shine with both calmness and fire.

Parvati and Ganesh by Jamini Roy

Durga as Protector & Warrior

If Shakti is creation, she is also destruction—the warrior who slays Mahishasura. In this theme, artists often bring Durga into conversation with the political anxieties of their time.

Gaganendranath Tagore’s Pratima Visarjan is not just a depiction of immersion. It is layered with irony and melancholy. The goddess, carefully carried for immersion, seems to mirror the fate of a colonized nation—its strength submerged yet never extinguished. Here, Durga becomes both protector and a silent witness to Bengal’s struggle under British rule.

Pratima Visarjan by Gaganendranath Tagore

Ganesh Pyne, with his dark, mystical palette, often returned to Durga as an internal presence. His Durga is not the pandal idol but a shadowed, almost ghostly figure—emerging through layers of memory, myth, and trauma. In works like his tempera pieces, the goddess hovers between dream and nightmare, a private vision of both hope and dread.

The Deity by Ganesh Pyne

Bikash Bhattacharjee too explored Durga with a haunting realism. His depictions of Kumartuli artisans crafting the goddess reveal a paradox: divine power being molded by human hands. The gaze of his Durga idols feels alive, almost unsettling, as if the goddess herself is watching us more than we are watching her.

"Durga Series" by Bikash Bhattacharya

M.F. Husain, India’s master of myth-making, brought Durga into his kaleidoscopic canvases with galloping horses and fragmented bodies. For Husain, Durga was not bound by temple walls; she was movement, energy, abstraction—an eternal rider over time.

Durga by Maqbool Fida Husain

Feminine Resistance & Political Power

Durga is not only a warrior goddess but also a symbol of resistance in the socio-political landscape.

Rupchand Kundu brings contemporary urgency into Durga imagery. His works place the goddess amid the turbulence of our times—where she is not just Mahishasuramardini but also a symbol of fighting corruption, violence, and inequality.

Chiranjit Paul, a younger artist, reimagines Durga with surrealist flair—fragmented forms, juxtaposed urban chaos, and goddess figures that feel almost cinematic. In his canvases, Durga becomes resistance in the age of globalization, climate crisis, and cultural fragmentation.

Feminist voices worldwide have also drawn upon goddess archetypes.

In today’s art, Durga is everywhere—from galleries to graffiti, NFTs to Instagram reels. Contemporary artists continue to expand her meaning.

Contemporary artists nowadays, reflect how Durga is not only myth but metaphor for contemporary Bengal—where urban struggles, gender politics, and cultural identity collide.

Durga 1 (Divine Strength) by Rupchand Kundu

Artist : Chiranjit Paul

Motherhood, Generosity & Earth as Goddess

Durga is also Uma, Parvati, Ma. She is the mother returning home for five days each autumn, welcomed with love and music. Artists often capture this duality of tenderness and terror.

Ujjwal Debnath, with his figurative finesse, paints Durga with warmth—eyes filled with compassion, the goddess radiating protective motherhood. His canvases remind us that behind the weapons lies the eternal mother who nurtures.

Painting by Ujjwal Debnath

Amit Bhar, known for his glowing oil-on-canvas works, imbues Durga with a luminous aura. In his hands, the goddess is both celestial and earthly—her skin shimmering in hues of gold and blue, her presence simultaneously divine and familiar.

Traditional folk artists—from Madhubani to Pattachitra—have also kept this maternal Shakti alive. Their painted scrolls depict Durga not as distant mythology but as living memory, tied to harvests, seasons, and family rituals.

Durga by Amit Bhar

Durga Puja as Living Exhibition

Durga Puja itself is perhaps the largest public art exhibition in the world. Each year, thousands of artisans, sculptors, and designers transform Kolkata into a gallery without walls. From traditional ekchala idols to experimental, avant-garde installations, the goddess inhabits both clay and concept. This year, in 2025, as we walk through pandals, we are also walking through centuries of artistic imagination.

A Durga Puja Pandal in Kolkata

While galleries preserve Durga in canvas and bronze, it is in the narrow lanes of Kumortuli that she is born year after year. Here, artistry is not archived—it is breathed into clay. Generations of potters, sculptors, and painters shape the goddess not from imagination alone, but from memory, devotion, and inherited touch.

The process begins with straw and river mud from the Ganga, believed to carry the soul of the land itself. Fingers coax form from formlessness—eyes remain unwritten till the sacred chokkudan, when the goddess is invited to see her people.

A Kumortuli artist at work

Parallel to them are the pandal artists and architects—visionaries who transform neighborhoods into temporary museums. Their craft is a fusion of sculpture, carpentry, installation art, lighting design, textile work, folk tradition, and futuristic imagination. From straw huts to glass labyrinths, from terracotta temples to recycled shipwrecks, each pandal is a spatial narrative of community, faith, and fleeting beauty.

These creators—often unnamed—are India’s largest public art movement. They do not exhibit; they immerse. They do not preserve; they dissolve. Their art returns to the river each year, only to rise again in another form, reminding us that Shakti is not static—it is cyclical, collaborative, and alive.

To encounter these works is to encounter ourselves—our fears, our resilience, our longing for renewal. And that is perhaps the greatest gift of Shakti: reminding us, year after year, canvas after canvas, immersion after immersion, that power lies not in domination but in creation, compassion, and continuity.