I. The Darkness Before the Awakening
The myth begins in collapse. The gods, once radiant, find themselves stripped of power. Mahishasura, buffalo-headed and unrelenting, has seized the heavens. His reign is not one of wisdom or balance, but of brute force, arrogance, and the stubborn insistence of chaos against order. The gods wander, dispossessed, their weapons shattered, their authority mocked.
Such is the texture of certain moments in history: the sense of a collective falling backwards, of progress reversed, of justice dismembered before our eyes. A society that once dreamt of light finds itself dragged back into a regressive night, ruled not by luminous sovereignty but by those who thrive on imbalance, who wear the mask of benevolence while feeding on dependency and distortion.
The Puranic imagination teaches us to see such moments not merely as political accidents but as metaphysical ruptures. For when Mahishasura reigns, the world is not simply under poor administration – it is under siege by forces that undermine the very principle of order, justice, and vitality. In such times, the question is not “who will win the next contest of power?” but rather: will Durga awaken?
II. Durga as Shakti: The Ontology of Power
When the gods admit their helplessness, Durga is born – not as a concession, but as the very force of life itself. The story is clear: the gods’ powers are insufficient; they must pool their energies, and out of their surrender emerges a new potency, radiant and terrible, beautiful and fierce. Durga is not simply another warrior in the field – she is Shakti, the animating energy without which the universe is inert.
Philosophically, Shakti reveals that sovereignty is not an arrangement of offices, nor a set of technocratic instruments. It is vitality, the pulse of collective will, the raw, breathing energy of a people. Without Shakti, governance becomes a corpse animated by external wires, hollow and mechanical.
When regressive orders impose themselves under the banner of “neutrality” or “interim necessity,” they seek to govern without Shakti, to substitute donor-led mechanisms for living energy. Yet history tells us such reigns never endure. Without the animating pulse of the people, power decays from within. The return of Durga is the return of life against sterility, of autonomous energy against the suffocation of imposed order.
III. Durga as the Dialectic of Good and Evil
Mahishasura is not evil in the sense of a fallen angel. He is not Satan. He is worse: he is imbalance incarnate. The buffalo-demon, half beast, half man, represents inertia, obstinacy, and the chaos of uncontrolled force. His reign is a perversion of balance, the triumph of what refuses harmony.
So too, in the present descent, the reigning asuric principle is not only violence, but distortion. It is a political order out of joint: a government without legitimacy, a sovereignty tethered to external will, a claim to stability masking deeper chaos. It is a buffalo power – stubborn, heavy, unyielding – not because it creates order, but because it suppresses equilibrium.
Here lies the philosophical lesson: evil is not merely malice; it is imbalance. It is the refusal of the dialectic, the suppression of opposites into a false stillness. Mahishasura’s reign is one in which contradiction is smothered rather than transcended, in which the vitality of struggle is replaced by suffocating uniformity.
Durga’s arrival is therefore not revenge. It is restoration. She comes not as cruelty but as balance. Her victory is not the obliteration of one side, but the reassertion of cosmic rhythm. When she pierces Mahishasura with her spear, she is not destroying for destruction’s sake – she is re-tuning the cosmos, reminding us that equilibrium cannot be suppressed forever.
IV. Durga as Feminine Assertion
One of the most radical moments in the myth is not the battle itself but the gods’ confession of weakness. Vishnu, Shiva, Brahma – lords of the cosmos – are impotent before Mahishasura. Their pride collapses. Their weapons break. Their authority dissolves.
From their despair emerges Durga. She is not their creation in the way a tool is fashioned; she is their energies transfigured into a wholly new form. A feminine force, terrible and radiant, whom the gods themselves must now serve.
This is epistemic humility: the recognition that what had been dismissed as “secondary” or “complementary” is in fact primary. The masculine order of gods admits failure; the feminine Shakti redefines power.
Politically, this allegory is striking. Elites who imagine themselves stewards of destiny – foreign patrons, domestic collaborators, technocrats – collapse before the brute force of imbalance. They cannot restore order, for their categories are exhausted. The only renewal possible is through Shakti, which they do not command but must yield to.
Durga’s emergence is thus the return of what had been excluded. She is the sovereign force that overturns patriarchal assumptions, that disrupts elite fantasies, that proves power does not flow from contracts or patronage but from the vitality of life itself.
V. Durga as Inner Struggle
The Mahishasura within is not distant. It is ego, ignorance, greed, the obstinate refusal to change. In the myth, the demon shifts form repeatedly: lion, elephant, buffalo, each time adapting, each time resisting. So too in societies: the Asur reappears under new guises – foreign saviour, domestic reformer, benevolent manager – always promising order, always delivering distortion.
The struggle, then, is not merely external. It is also internal: the temptation to surrender sovereignty, to accept the illusion (maya) of benevolent tutelage, to prefer dependency over the difficult work of autonomy. The Asur thrives not because he is strong, but because we let him live within us – our fear, our laziness, our fatigue.
Durga is the awakened self. She is the courage to pierce illusion, to see through promises, to endure the hardship of self-determination. The philosophical truth here is that liberation is not granted – it is willed, and willed repeatedly. Each cycle of Mahishasura’s rise demands a new awakening of Durga within the collective psyche.
VI. Durga as Political Philosophy
In Bengal’s modern history, Durga’s image was transformed into the Mother of the Nation, invoked in resistance to colonial power. She was not only a goddess but an archetype of sovereignty – the refusal to be ruled from outside, the assertion that a people can and must govern themselves.
Today, when regressive reign returns under foreign blessing, when sovereignty is bartered in the name of reciprocity, the myth speaks anew. Mahishasura’s reign is the reign of dependency, of governance scripted elsewhere, of dignity suspended. Durga is the counter-principle: the archetype of resistance, the imagination of saying no when all the world says yes.
She is not simply a victory in battle; she is the reminder that sovereignty is cyclical. She comes, restores order, and departs. The work of freedom is never finished; it is renewed in each generation. Her absence is felt in times of collapse, her presence in times of renewal. The people must learn to invoke her, not as a miracle but as a principle.
VII. The Philosophical Moment We Inhabit
Where do we stand now? The signs are unmistakable. Mahishasura reigns, clothed in the rhetoric of benevolence, enthroned by foreign applause, masking brute inertia as enlightened governance. The gods are silent, their weapons blunted, their power evacuated. The polity drifts backwards into regressive night, seduced by the illusion of stability, forgetting the price of dependency.
This is precisely the moment before Durga awakens. Philosophy warns us: Shakti cannot be suppressed forever. Balance cannot be denied endlessly. The buffalo-demon always rises, and always falls.
Our task is not to despair but to remember. To remember that Durga is not a mythic consolation but a principle of history. She is the return of vitality against sterility, of balance against distortion, of sovereignty against dependency. She is the reminder that even in collapse, the possibility of renewal remains.
VIII. Conclusion: Invoking Durga
The Devi Mahatmya closes with Durga’s victory, but also her departure. She does not stay to rule. She comes when needed, restores balance, and withdraws. This is both comfort and warning. Comfort, because her arrival is inevitable when the imbalance grows unbearable. Warning, because her presence is not permanent – each generation must summon her anew.
Our moment is the night before her awakening. Mahishasura reigns; the gods tremble. Yet even now, in the silence of collapse, the possibility stirs: the gathering of energies, the pooling of despair into new radiance.
Durga will arrive – not as a miracle, but as necessity. For the world cannot endure imbalance forever. And when she does, the buffalo-demon will fall, as he has always fallen, and sovereignty will return – not as a gift, but as Shakti, the very force of life itself.
I am Iconus Clustus—justice activist, truth-seeker, and writer. My work is rooted in the unfinished struggle for recognition of the 1971 Bangladesh Genocide. Guided by philosophy, I write to provoke thought, stir conscience, and insist on justice as a shared responsibility.