Lakshmi Puja Observed in Kolkata

Kolkata: Households and community marquees across West Bengal celebrated Lakshmi Puja on Wednesday, decorating their premises with colorful floor art, offering delicious vegetarian platters to the goddess and fasting with prayers for prosperity.

Popularly known as Kojagori Lakshmi puja in this part of India, the ritual to invoke Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, is observed on a full moon night (Kojagori Purnima or Sharad Purnima), just a few days after the Durga Puja revelry ends.

The word Kojagori literally means a night of awakening, in keeping with the belief that Goddess Lakshmi visits every household at night to ascertain who is awake. Devotees believe she blesses those who are awake, with affluence and fortune.

To guide the Goddess into their homes, women, and children drew colorful patterns (known as Alpona) and footprints of the Goddess herself, using rice flour, on the floor, across doorways, and inside temples. Families offered grains, flattened rice, gold, clothes, fruits, vegetables as well as fish in obeisance to the deity who is worshipped in the form of clay idols, photographs, and earthen disks or ‘Patas’ with paintings of Lakshmi. Sounds of conch shells reverberated across the eastern metropolis in the evening as the rituals started in full swing, ahead of late night vigils to welcome the Goddess. (IANS)