Durga Puja Gift Ideas

For most of Durga Puja nobody is buying anybody a gift. The five days from Shashthi to Dashami belong to the pandal: the bodhon that opens it, the anjali on Ashtami with both hands full of flowers, the dhak, and the walking from pandal to pandal until two in the morning. The gifting comes at the end. On Bijoya Dashami, once the pratima has gone to the water, the visiting starts. You go to the elders in the family, you pranam, they feed you something sweet, and you do not turn up empty handed. In many families that round of visits runs on for a fortnight past Dashami. That is the occasion worth buying for, and it is the part every gifting listicle skips.

Sweets are what gets carried on an ordinary visit, and for an ordinary visit sweets are the correct answer. We do not make them, and we do not make the pratima either, since that is unfired clay on a straw and bamboo frame, built for one season and returned to the river. What is worth buying here is the other thing people give at Bijoya: something for the thakur ghor that is still in the house long after the naru is finished.

Start from who you are visiting

Almost everybody arriving here is searching for a person rather than an object. Parents and in-laws, wife, husband, sister, the friend whose house you have gone to every Bijoya for twenty years. The answer changes more by household than by relationship.

To the elders you pranam, the convention is the substantial piece, and it goes on the shrine rather than the sideboard. A Durga or Sherawali Mata murti in solid brass is the safe form. Where the house already keeps her, Lakshmi is the better gift than a second Durga, because Kojagari Lokkhi Pujo falls on the very next full moon and the piece gets used inside the fortnight.

For a wife or a husband the gift is usually personal rather than devotional, and clothes and jewellery win that one more often than not. What works here is the small plated piece kept where she actually sits, a desk or a dressing table rather than the mandir.

For a younger relative who has moved away for work, and they are a common Bijoya recipient because they are home for the week and leaving again, a pocket temple is the strongest thing on this list. It is a shrine that closes, so it survives a rented flat in another city, and the Nav Durga one folds all nine forms into it.

For the host of a house you are visiting rather than a member of the family, keep it small and keep it neutral. A plated piece under a thousand rupees, or a brass diya for the evening lamp, is right. A large figure from a guest reads as an obligation being placed on the household.

Office and para gifting is the bigger half of this

In Bengal the Puja is when companies pay out. The state issues a notification most years asking that bonus be settled before the festival begins, and a great deal of employee and client gifting rides along with it. Budgets sit between roughly five hundred and two thousand rupees a head, which is exactly the band a small plated murti, a pocket temple or a diya occupies. Where the recipient list is mixed and a deity is the wrong call, the corporate range of meenakari and brass decor does the same job without assuming a faith.

Two things go wrong with these lists. The first is timing. Everyone works to Mahalaya as the deadline, and courier capacity into Kolkata in the ten days before it is the tightest it gets all year, so order a month out rather than a fortnight. The second is assortment. Buy one design in the quantity you need rather than assembling a mixture, because recipients compare, and a mixture reads as whatever was left in stock. Past about twenty pieces the bulk order enquiry page is faster than the cart.

Para and housing society pujas run a smaller version of the same thing, with gifts for the volunteers and prizes for the competitions, and both rules hold there too.

The names, and which festival you are buying for

Durga, Maa Durga, Sherawali Mata in the north, Mahishasuramardini where the emphasis is on the form with the lion, Nav Durga for the nine. Around this week you will also see Debi Durga, Ma Durga and Durgotsab, and Bijoya, Bijoya Dashami and Subho Bijoya for the last day and the greeting that goes with it. Vijayadashami is the same day under its Sanskrit name.

Which festival matters more than which spelling. In Bengal, Assam and Odisha this is a community festival built around a pandal pratima, and a household piece is a companion to it rather than the centre of anything. Across the north and west the same nights are kept as Navratri, with fasting, garba and a household murti at the middle of it, and the gifting convention there is the return gift handed out at a jagran or a mata ki chowki. In Tamil Nadu and Karnataka the same nights are Golu, a tiered display a Durga piece sits within. If the household you are buying for keeps it either of those ways, the Navratri page is the better one.

Which finish survives what

Solid brass is the choice where the piece will be bathed, handled and used every day. Ours is poured slowly into a mould made for that one idol and broken open once the metal has cooled, so every casting gets its own mould. That is why the detail holds where a reusable sand mould softens it, and why the alloy has to be high grade, since a lesser brass will not fill the shape cleanly. Sand cast brass is a different and cheaper process, and on a form this busy, with eight arms, weapons and a lion under her, the difference shows first around the face and the trishul.

Gold and silver plated pieces are a resin core with a layer of copper over it and the precious metal electroplated on top, and some carry both metals. The copper is the part worth knowing about, because resin cannot be plated directly and the copper is what the gold or silver keys onto. It is why these are light, why the detail stays crisp at a small size, and why water is the one thing they cannot take. They present at their best straight out of the box, which is what you want from something handed over in somebody else's front room.

The white and gold pieces are a resin core coated in marble dust. The jewellery on them is made separately in brass, electroplated, and applied to the figure by hand one piece at a time, which is why the finish varies a little between pieces. Keep them dry, and lift by the base rather than by an arm or the trishul.

Every piece is checked at our own warehouse before it goes out, and everything ships in our own packaging, which is made to be opened rather than merely to survive the journey. That counts for more here than on most pages, because a Bijoya gift is unwrapped in the room it was carried into.

What to spend

Under five hundred covers a small plated piece or a single diya, and it is the right band for a long office list or a para distribution. Under a thousand is where the pocket temples and most small plated murtis sit, and it is the band for a visit to a house that is not your own. Under three thousand buys a brass murti at a size a shrine can actually take, which is the usual gift to parents and in-laws. Above five thousand you are into the piece a household keeps for decades, and there the deciding question is not the budget but whether they already have a Durga.