Sindoor Khela: The Last Hour of Bengal's Durga Puja

The priest has finished. The idols are still under their garlands, the drums have stopped for a moment, and for roughly an hour the floor in front of the goddess belongs to women in red-bordered white, carrying small flat boxes of vermilion. It ends with everybody's face scarlet and a great deal of laughing. Then the trucks come.

That hour is Sindoor Khela — the vermilion game. It is the most photographed thing in Bengal's Durga Puja and one of the least explained. And this year it does not fall on the day most of the country will be keeping Dussehra.

You will be told two dates, and both are right

For Kolkata in 2026 the Dashami tithi begins at 12:50 PM on Tuesday 20 October and ends at 2:11 PM on Wednesday 21 October.

Read that twice, because the whole confusion lives in it. The sun rises on Tuesday the 20th several hours before Dashami has started — that morning is still Navami. The sun rises on Wednesday the 21st with Dashami already running. So a reckoning that asks which morning holds the tithi lands on Wednesday; a reckoning that asks which afternoon holds it lands on Tuesday, because Dashami opens at ten to one that day and the rites are an afternoon matter.

Bengal follows the first. Most of India follows the second.

The result is that Vijayadashami for most of the country is Tuesday 20 October 2026, and Bijoya Dashami in Bengal is Wednesday 21 October — Sindoor Khela, kolakuli, and then the immersion. Drikpanchang's own Kolkata calendar prints the split inside a single table: Durga Visarjan against Tuesday, and Bengal Durga Visarjan, with Sindoor Utsav, against Wednesday.

Two other things in that calendar are worth knowing before you plan anything. The Durga Puja week runs only six days this year, 16 to 21 October. And Ashtami and Navami compress onto the same day, Monday 19 October — one morning, not two, which matters to anyone hoping to be in two places for Sandhi Puja. If you are also marking the burning of the effigies, that happens on the Tuesday, and we have written separately about the people who build them.

What actually happens, in sequence

Sindoor Khela is not a free-for-all that breaks out. It sits at a fixed point in a longer rite, and the steps are consistent enough to list.

The worship proper ends with the Visarjan Puja — the formal closing. What follows is Devi Baran, the welcoming-and-farewell, and this is the women's part. They come in white saris with red borders and perform arati. Vermilion goes first on the goddess: her forehead, and her feet. She is offered sweets and betel leaves. In many houses she is fed the way a daughter is fed before a journey, because that is the frame the whole day is built on — Durga has been home for four days and is going back to her husband.

Only then do the women turn to each other. Sindoor on the forehead. Sindoor pressed onto the bangles — the shankha of conch shell, the red pala of coral, the iron noa — which are the ones a married Bengali woman wears. Then faces, properly, by the handful. Then sweets again, eaten as prasad.

The embrace that follows has its own name, kolakuli, and it is the one part of the afternoon that is not restricted to anybody — men embrace each other too, and the greeting Subho Bijoya goes with it. Somewhere in the courtyard a dhunuchi will be smoking, because the dance with the earthen burner belongs to these same evenings, and the smell of resin on coals is most of what people say they remember afterwards.

Nobody agrees how old it is, or even which day it belongs to

Two origin stories circulate with equal confidence. One puts it at around two hundred years, beginning in the Durga Pujas of the zamindar households, as something that kept the women of a large joint family on good terms. The other says it is as old as Durga Puja itself, something like four hundred years. The date and place of origin are simply not known, and anyone who tells you otherwise is choosing.

The day is not fixed either, which surprises people who assume Dashami is the whole point. At Dubrajpur it is kept on Mahasaptami, after the nabapatrika has been bathed. In Bijra, a village near Memari in Purba Bardhaman, the Ghosh and Bose family pujas keep it on Mahastami, in a practice described locally as almost five hundred years old.

So a rite that reads as fixed and ancient is neither, quite. That is worth saying plainly, because the argument about who may take part tends to be conducted as though the tradition were a single settled thing.

The part that is harder to write

Sindoor Khela has traditionally been for married women. Not by accident, and not as an oversight — the exclusion is structural.

The belief attached to it is that a woman who keeps the custom properly will never be widowed. The rite is understood as a wife's protection of her husband and children. Read that against the restriction and the logic closes on itself: a widow is living evidence against the promise, so the women with the most reason to want comfort on that afternoon are the ones the custom has kept outside the circle. Divorced women, single mothers and transgender women have historically been outside it too.

The writer Taslima Nasrin has criticised it on exactly this ground — that the emphasis on married status, of the goddess and of the women, teaches girls watching from the edge that a life is incomplete without a husband.

That criticism is live, and so is the response to it, which has not come from scholars but from the pujas themselves. A Calcutta Times campaign — #NoConditionsApply — sent invitations carrying two dots of vermilion to women who had been kept out, and widows, transgender women and women from the city's red-light district played Sindoor Khela alongside married women. Pujas have taken it up since, in Kolkata and well beyond it.

I am not going to tell you which of those is the real tradition. Both are being practised this month in the same city, sometimes a few streets apart, and a custom whose own origin cannot be dated to within two centuries is in no position to rule anybody out on grounds of antiquity. What is worth noticing is that the change came from inside — from committees and families deciding, pandal by pandal, who gets handed the box.

Then she goes

After the vermilion, the idols come down. They are carried out, usually by men, through streets that have been full for four days, onto rafts or down to the ghats, and the clay goes into the water. Durga Puja in Kolkata went onto UNESCO's Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2021, and the immersion is the part the cameras wait for.

But the hour before it is the one that stays with people, and it is not grand. It is a courtyard, a red-stained floor, somebody's grandmother being held by the chin while two younger women mark her forehead, and the understanding that this is the last of it until next year. If you have ever wondered why Bengal's four days feel so different from a nine-night fast kept elsewhere, that difference is a whole subject of its own.

Wednesday 21 October, then. Not the Tuesday. Check with the house you are going to, because the family almanac decides and families keep different ones — and if you are the person arriving with sweets, arrive before the trucks do.