Jagaddhatri comes round again on Wednesday, 18 November. In Chandannagar and the towns around it, more than 190 neighbourhood committees will put her up in pandals paid for by local chanda, and that whole arrangement is what Bengal calls barowari. Ask most people where barowari began and they'll say Durga Puja. The oldest account we could find tells it differently.
The usual version goes back to Guptipara, a village in Hooghly, sometime in the late 1700s. A group of men were turned away from a zamindar's Durga Puja, so they went around the nearby villages collecting money and held their own. Twelve of them ran the committee. Baro is twelve, yari is friends, and that's the name. At the time a puja was something a raja or zamindar hosted at home, and everyone else came as a guest. Guptipara showed that a village could pay for one itself.
The earliest record is a short piece in The Friend of India, a Serampore magazine, from May 1820. It's credited to the missionary James Long. It says that about thirty years earlier, some Brahmins at Guptipara had formed an association to hold a puja outside the rules of the Shastras. They chose twelve men as a committee and asked the villages around them to chip in.
The goddess was Jagaddhatri. The article spells her ‘Jugudhatree’. She was worshipped for seven days, and people came from more than a hundred miles away. The organisers hired the best singers in Bengal, fed every Brahmin who showed up, and decided to do it again the next year.
So how did it turn into a Durga story? After Guptipara the idea reached Chinsurah, Santipur and Kancharapara, then Kolkata, where the community pujas were Durga's. The first one there is usually credited to the Sanatan Dharmotsahini Sabha in Bhowanipore, around 1909 or 1910. Durga Puja became the big festival, so it's easy to see the origin story getting folded into it. That's our guess, and none of the sources says so.
So did Jagaddhatri give Bengal the barowari? As far as the earliest account goes, the first one was hers. Durga's pandals picked up the idea later.
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