Living tradition, India
Kolkata
The city of Durga Puja, where married women smear each other with sindoor on the festival's last day.
Kolkata's Durga Puja, held each autumn, is the largest festival of the city and was inscribed by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage in 2021. On Bijoya Dashami, its final day, married Bengali women gather at pandals to offer sindoor to the goddess and smear it on each other's foreheads and cheeks in the Sindur Khela, before the images are taken to the river.
Sindur Khela
In the Sindur Khela, "game of sindoor", women in white saris with red borders first touch sindoor to the goddess Durga's forehead and offer sweets, then apply it to each other's hair partings, foreheads and faces, wishing each other long married lives. In recent years some pandals have opened the rite to widows and to women of other groups, a change discussed in the city.
The Bengali bride
A Bengali bride traditionally wears a red and white look: red sindoor in the parting, a large red bindi, and a pattern of white and red dots, called chandan, painted above the brows in arcs. She also wears the white shell bangle, shankha, and the red one, pola. The teep, the Bengali word for bindi, is worn every day by many women.
Guides of Kolkata
Photo credits on this page
The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Bindi: Vinay Sahay, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Sindoor: Masum-al-hasan, CC BY-SA 3.0, source
- Kumkum: Thamizhpparithi Maari, CC BY-SA 3.0, source