Who Gave Dhirendra Shastri the Right to Decide What Bengalis Eat During Durga Puja?
Dhirendra Shastri's demand for a meat-free Durga Puja is not spiritual guidance alone; it reflects a troubling attempt to impose one region’s religious practices on another
Dhirendra Krishna Shastri arrived in Bengal as a religious preacher. But when he began telling Bengalis how they should observe Durga Puja and what they should or should not eat, he crossed the line between expressing a personal belief and policing an entire culture.
During his Kolkata visit, the Bageshwar Dham chief appealed to Bengali Hindus not to consume or sell non-vegetarian food during the festive period. He reportedly went so far as to suggest that even if people did not install a Durga idol, they should take a pledge to avoid non-vegetarian food during Navratri.
The obvious question is: who gave him the authority to issue such instructions?
Shastri is entitled to follow vegetarianism. He is entitled to advise his own followers to do the same. A particular puja committee may also voluntarily decide what can be served within its pandal. But neither popularity nor religious influence gives one individual the right to prescribe a uniform way of worship for millions of people especially while standing in a region whose traditions he appears unwilling to understand.
Durga Puja Is Not Simply Bengal’s Version of North Indian Navratri
Across large parts of northern and western India, Navratri is associated with fasting, abstinence and vegetarian food. Bengal’s Durga Puja, however, has developed through its own history, cultural imagination and diverse Shakta traditions.
For Bengalis, Durga Puja is not merely nine days of ritual restraint. It is the annual homecoming of Uma the daughter returning to her maternal home with her children. It is at once worship, reunion, art, public celebration and community feasting.
UNESCO recognises Durga Puja in Kolkata as an element of humanity’s Intangible Cultural Heritage. It describes the festival as a major collective celebration involving artisans, communities, installations and public participation not as a practice governed by one rigid national template.
Many Bengali families eat vegetarian food on particular days. Numerous pandals serve traditional vegetarian bhog. Others eat fish, eggs or meat according to family and community customs. There are also Shakta traditions in Bengal in which non-vegetarian offerings have long held ritual significance.
This variety is not evidence of weaker faith. It is evidence of Hinduism’s extraordinary regional diversity.
Attempting to replace that diversity with a single dietary code is not religious reform. It is cultural domination.
Advice Becomes Bullying When It Comes with Moral Superiority
There is a difference between saying, “In my tradition, we avoid non-vegetarian food,” and declaring, “Bengalis should stop eating it.”
The first is a statement of belief. The second assumes superiority.
It suggests that one person’s practice is purer than another’s, that one regional interpretation of Hinduism is more authentic than Bengal’s centuries-old traditions, and that Bengali Hindus require an outsider’s approval to worship their own goddess correctly.
That is precisely why the statement feels culturally aggressive. It does not begin by asking how Bengal worships Durga. It begins by identifying something in Bengal that Shastri dislikes and instructing Bengalis to correct it.
A guest may respectfully disagree with a local practice. A guest does not get to rewrite the host’s culture.
Even West Bengal BJP president Samik Bhattacharya publicly rejected the demand, saying that Bengalis would decide for themselves what they eat and that outside religious figures could not dictate the state’s food or cultural habits.
This is significant because resistance to Shastri’s statement cannot conveniently be dismissed as opposition to Hinduism or as party politics. The objection comes from within the Hindu community as well: Hinduism does not belong to one preacher, organisation, caste, region or food culture.
Is Food Now a Test of Faith?
India has increasingly witnessed attempts to turn food into a public certificate of morality. What a person eats is no longer treated as a private, familial or regional choice; it is used to judge whether someone is sufficiently religious, respectable or “pure.”
But India’s food traditions have never been uniform.
Kashmiri, Bengali, Assamese, Odia, Goan, Kerala and many other Hindu communities have their own relationships with fish and meat. Several communities maintain vegetarian kitchens during worship but eat non-vegetarian meals outside ritual spaces. Others follow different rules on different days. Some practise complete vegetarianism.
Who gets to declare that only one of these ways is genuinely Hindu?
If vegetarianism is a personal act of devotion, it deserves respect. When it is used to shame or control others, it stops being an expression of faith and becomes an instrument of power.
Respecting the Pandal Is Different from Controlling Bengal
There can be a reasonable discussion about what should be sold immediately beside a Durga idol or inside a puja enclosure. Local organisers, priests and residents can collectively decide how to maintain the sanctity of that particular space.
But that limited question cannot be expanded into a command that Bengalis should abandon non-vegetarian food throughout Durga Puja or observe the festival according to the customs of another region.
The pandal belongs to its organisers and community. Bengal’s kitchens do not belong to Dhirendra Shastri.
Nor can the religious practices of an entire state be reduced to the personal preferences of a visiting preacher.
Bengal Does Not Need a Certificate of Hinduism
Bengal’s relationship with the divine is older, deeper and more complex than any televised sermon. It is present in Shakta worship, Vaishnava devotion, temple rituals, family traditions, literature, music, art and the neighbourhood puja.
Bengalis do not need to prove their devotion by copying another region’s customs. A vegetarian Bengali is not more Hindu than a Bengali who eats fish. A fasting devotee is not automatically more sincere than someone who celebrates through a family feast.
Faith cannot be measured from a dinner plate.
Dhirendra Shastri may command a large following, but a following is not a mandate. He may express his beliefs, but he cannot present them as compulsory instructions for an entire people.
India’s unity has survived because different regions have been allowed to worship the same gods in different languages, with different rituals and different food traditions. Flattening these differences does not strengthen Hinduism. It diminishes it.
Bengal will celebrate Durga in the way Bengal knows with devotion, art, argument, music, bhog, family meals and a remarkable variety of customs.
Shastri is free to choose what appears on his own plate.
He is not free to decide what should disappear from everyone else’s.