The Advanced Puja is significantly more sophisticated than the original Durga Puja Beginner, adding several viddhis and stotrams, including the Durga Sahasranam. This book guides the spiritual seeker toward union with Durga, the Goddess who takes away confusion, replacing it with stillness and clarity.

This book contains a beginners Shiva Puja, intermediate Shiva Puja, advanced Shiva Puja, the one thousand names of Shiva, and a complete system for a Vedic fire yagna, or sacrifice. By performing Shiva Puja and Yajna we sacrifice egoistic tendencies into the fire of Divine union and come to experience the bliss of Pure Consciousness.

This book is compiled with the goal of explaining the hidden history, significance, and meaning of the mantras used in common Hindu puja rituals performed by the Bengalis to the Bengali immigrants.

A Complete E-Book on Puzzles & Seating Arrangement incorporates more than 500+ questions on the different patterns of Puzzles and Seating Arrangement. The Practice Sets are based on the questions asked in the past 3-years in different Banking Examinations. These are also provided to get the students acquainted with the change in pattern through all these years. The best Tricks and Concepts along with their detailed explanations on how to solve the Puzzles and Seating Arrangement with proper Approach has been provided in the book. 300+ Questions on Puzzles & Seating Arrangement with detailed explanation and concepts. 200+ Questions for Practice (with Solution) New and Convenient Approach to solve the tricky questions Incorporates more than 15 Types of Puzzles & Sitting Arrangement Incorporates all kinds of latest pattern questions Incorporates the last 3-year Memory Based Questions asked in SBI, IBPS, RBI & Other Examinations. Puzzle Types – Floor / Flat Based Days / Month Based Box Based Categorized/ Sequencial/ Distributing Order Comparison Relations Based Direction and Distance Based Mixed / Conditional Certain/ Uncertain / Calculative and others Seating Arrangement Types- Circular Based / Square Based/ Reactangular Based Same Facing/ Inside-Outside/ Variables/ Certain / Uncertain/ Relations/ Two circles Square Based – Same Facing / Inside – outside/ Variables/ Relations and others Reactangular Based- Same Facing/ Inside-Outside/ Variables/ Certain / Uncertain/ Relations/ Two Reactangle Linear Arrangement- Straight Row / Parallel Row Same Facing/ With Variables/ North-South/ Relations/Certain/Uncertain/ Others Validity: 12 Months

Explores the contemporary nature and the diverse narratives, rituals, and performances of the Navar?tri festival. Nine Nights of the Goddess explores the festival of Navarātri—alternatively called Navarātra, Mahānavamī, Durgā Pūjā, Dasarā, and/or Dassain—which lasts for nine nights and ends with a celebration called Vijayadaśamī, or "the tenth (day) of victory." Celebrated in both massive public venues and in small, private domestic spaces, Navarātri is one of the most important and ubiquitous festivals in South Asia and wherever South Asians have settled. These festivals share many elements, including the goddess, royal power, the killing of demons, and the worship of young girls and married women, but their interpretation and performance vary widely. This interdisciplinary collection of essays investigates Navarātri in its many manifestations and across historical periods, including celebrations in West Bengal, Odisha, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, and Nepal. Collectively, the essays consider the role of the festival's contextual specificity and continental ubiquity as a central component for understanding South Asian religious life, as well as how it shapes and is shaped by political patronage, economic development, and social status.

Annually during the months of autumn, Bengal hosts three interlinked festivals to honor its most important goddesses: Durga, Kali, and Jagaddhatri. While each of these deities possesses a distinct iconography, myth, and character, they are all martial. Durga, Kali, and Jagaddhatri often demand blood sacrifice as part of their worship and offer material and spiritual benefits to their votaries. Richly represented in straw, clay, paint, and decoration, they are similarly displayed in elaborately festooned temples, thronged by thousands of admirers. The first book to recount the history of these festivals and their revelry, rivalry, and nostalgic power, this volume marks an unprecedented achievement in the mapping of a major public event. Rachel Fell McDermott describes the festivals' origins and growth under British rule. She identifies their iconographic conventions and carnivalesque qualities and their relationship to the fierce, Tantric sides of ritual practice. McDermott confronts controversies over the tradition of blood sacrifice and the status-seekers who compete for symbolic capital. Expanding her narrative, she takes readers beyond Bengal's borders to trace the transformation of the goddesses and their festivals across the world. McDermott's work underscores the role of holidays in cultural memory, specifically the Bengali evocation of an ideal, culturally rich past. Under the thrall of the goddess, the social, political, economic, and religious identity of Bengalis takes shape.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1871.

This book examines the making of the Goddess Durga both as an art and as part of the intangible heritage of Bengal. As the ‘original site of production’ of unbaked clay idols of the Hindu Goddess Durga and other Gods and Goddesses, Kumartuli remains at the centre of such art and heritage. The art and heritage of Kumartuli have been facing challenges in a rapidly globalizing world that demands constant redefinition of ‘art’ with the invasion of market forces and migration of idol makers. As such, the book includes chapters on the evolution of idols, iconographic transformations, popular culture and how the public is constituted by the production and consumption of the works of art and heritage and finally the continuous shaping and reshaping of urban imaginaries and contestations over public space. It also investigates the caste group of Kumbhakars (Kumars or the idol makers), reflecting on the complex relation between inherited skill and artistry. Further, it explores how the social construction of art as ‘art’ introduces a tangled web of power asymmetries between ‘art’ and ‘craft’, between an ‘artist’ and an ‘artisan’, and between ‘appreciation’ and ‘consumption’, along with their implications for the articulation of market in particular and social relations in general. Since little has been written on this heritage hub beyond popular pamphlets, documents on town planning and travelogues, the book, written by authors from various fields, opens up cross-disciplinary conversations, situating itself at the interface between art history, sociology of aesthetics, politics and government, social history, cultural studies, social anthropology and archaeology. The book is aimed at a wide readership, including students, scholars, town planners, heritage preservationists, lawmakers and readers interested in heritage in general and Kumartuli in particular.