Mahalaya: The 4am Radio Broadcast That Starts Autumn

The street is doing nothing. It is ten minutes to four on an October morning in north Kolkata and the only light is the one over a shuttered tea stall, still on from the night before. A municipal water tanker has left a wet stripe down the middle of the road. Someone's window is open on the second floor.

Then, from that window and from three others and from a ground-floor room with a curtain instead of a door, the same sound starts at the same second. A conch. Then a man's voice, low and unhurried, beginning in Sanskrit.

This happens once a year. It has happened, with one interruption, every year since 1931.

What is actually playing

The programme is called Mahishasuramardini — "she who crushed the buffalo demon" — and it runs one hour and twenty-nine minutes. It was first broadcast at 4am on Mahalaya in 1931, on what was then the Indian State Broadcasting Service in Calcutta, five years before it was renamed All India Radio.

Three people made it. Bani Kumar wrote the script, stitching together hymns from the Chandi, verses, and devotional songs into something that was neither a religious service nor a concert but a sequence with a narrative shape. Pankaj Mullick composed and directed the music. And Birendra Krishna Bhadra recited the chandipath — the long Sanskrit invocation that is the spine of the whole thing.

For the first three and a half decades it went out live. A studio full of singers and instrumentalists assembling in the small hours to perform it in real time, once, to a city in the dark. In 1966 it was finally committed to tape, and the recording made then is broadly the one still transmitted now. Bhadra died in 1991. His voice has opened every autumn since.

What strikes me about it, listening from a long way away, is how little it has been modernised. There is no attempt to make it sound current. The tape hiss is audible. The singers — Dwijen Mukhopadhyay, Pratima Bandopadhyay, Shyamal Mitra among them — are singing in an idiom that was already a generation old when it was recorded. Nobody has remastered the warmth out of it.

Why four in the morning

Mahalaya sits on a hinge, and the hour is part of the hinge.

It falls on the new moon of Ashwin, the day that closes Pitru Paksha — a fortnight given over to the dead, when families perform tarpan, offering water to three generations of ancestors. Nothing new is begun in that fortnight. No house is moved into, no business opened, no wedding held. It is a deliberately fallow two weeks.

Mahalaya is the last day of it. And the same dawn, by long custom, is when the goddess is invoked to begin her journey home — the start of Devi Paksha, the bright fortnight that runs up to Durga Puja.

So the broadcast is not background music for a festival. It is the sound of a calendar turning over. Grief closes; the season opens. Four in the morning is simply where the seam falls.

In 2026, Mahalaya is Saturday 10 October. Pitru Paksha runs from around 27 September to that date. Navratri begins the next day, 11 October, and Durga Puja proper starts on Shashthi, 16 October, with Vijayadashami on 20 October. The dates move every year with the lunar calendar, so it is worth checking rather than assuming.

What people are doing while it plays

Not sitting still and listening, mostly. That is the part that surprises people who expect a sacred broadcast to be received in silence.

In a lot of households the radio — or now, just as often, a phone propped against a steel tumbler — is on while the ordinary machinery of the morning runs. Someone is filling a bucket. Someone is finding a clean dhoti. A pot of water is going on for tea that nobody will drink sitting down.

There is usually something burning. A clay pot of dhuno — resin smoked over coals — or a few sticks of incense in front of whatever the house keeps as its shrine. It is a small thing and it does a specific job: it marks the room as different from how it was last night. In Bengal the resin in that pot is sal dhuna, tapped off Shorea robusta trunks in the forests to the west; a house with no coals going reaches for a stick instead, which is the part of this we make ourselves. Either way it reads as morning, not evening.

By the time the recording reaches its last song, the sky over the river has gone grey. Then the second half of the morning begins, and it moves outdoors.

The ghats at first light

Along the Hooghly — at Babughat, at Ahiritola, at Baje Kadamtala — men stand thigh-deep in brown water facing east, holding it in cupped palms and letting it fall. That is tarpan: water, black sesame, and the names of the dead, offered back to the river.

It is not solemn in the way a Western funeral is solemn. It is crowded. Priests work several people at once, sitting on low wooden platforms at the waterline. There are queues. Someone's phone rings. People change out of wet clothes behind a held-up towel and go to work afterwards. The grief is real and it is also completely folded into a Saturday morning, which is, I think, a healthier arrangement than most things Europe has built for the same purpose.

The year they changed the voice

In 1976 All India Radio decided the programme needed refreshing. They commissioned a new version — Durga Durgatiharini — with the actor Uttam Kumar, then the most famous Bengali on earth, in Bhadra's place.

It did not work. The response from listeners was bad enough that the original recording was restored, and it has not been meddled with since.

That episode is usually told as a funny story about audiences being stubborn. I read it differently. The city had not memorised a text; it had memorised a voice — a particular set of vowels at a particular hour, at a particular level of tape noise. Swap the voice and the cue stops working, no matter how good the replacement is. This is an unusually clean demonstration of something perfumers and sound designers both know and rarely get to prove: the trigger is not the content, it is the exact sensory signature.

What it is worth borrowing

I am not suggesting anyone adopt someone else's festival. But there is a piece of structure here that travels.

Almost every seasonal marker most of us have left is visual — a display in a shop, a change in the light, a date on a screen. Very few of them are things you have to be awake at a specific hour to receive, and almost none are shared with several million other people simultaneously.

Mahalaya is. It costs nothing, it requires no equipment, and its only real demand is that you get up. What it buys is a fixed point: an hour and a half, once a year, where the sound in the room tells you the season has changed and you are not the one who decided it.

If there is something you want to mark this autumn — the end of a hard stretch, a person you have lost, the turn out of the fallow fortnight into the bright one — the form is already there and is older than any of us. Pick the hour. Pick the sound. Be awake for it.