Here is your paragraph on Durga puja:

Durga Puja is primarily observed in Bengal, where beautiful images of Durga are made and in-fact experimented by the artist and with different media such as clay, wax, rice, papers, pulses, seeds and so on.

The image is installed in a beautifully decorated and slightly raised platform on the days of worship inside a huge pandal.

Houses are freshly leaped, white-washed, new dresses are knit before Durga Puja.

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In Bengal, Durga Puja commemorates the victory of Durga over a buffalo-headed demon, the form under which she is adorned is that of an image with ten arms and a weapon in each hand, her right leg resting on a lion and her left on the buffalo demon. This image is worshipped daily until the end of the festival when it is cast into a river.

On Vijaya Dashmi day, the image is carried in procession and finally immersed in the Ganga. The primitive side of the ‘Durga’ can be seen in the human and animal sacrifices offered to her, the use of intoxicants and her epithet Chinnamasta (The Headless).

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In Durga’s principal temple in Calcutta, seven to eight hundred goats are slaughtered during the Durga Puja in the autumn, their heads being placed in piles before her image. Pigs, fowls, sheep and water-buffaloes are also immolated. Until 1835 when the British Government with the help of some enlight­ened Indians, suppressed human sacrifice, a boy was beheaded every Friday before the altars. In 1830 a Raja sacrificed twenty-five men to Durga.

Durga puja is fervently observed in Kashi. As the month of Ashvina begins its waxing fortnight, the fall, Navaratra, the ‘Nine Nights’ of the Goddess. Each day the focus is on a different one of the city’s nine Durgas and nine Gauris.

Most of the city’s great goddesses are among these eighteen. The great Durga of Durga Kund is called Kushmanda (“Pumpkin Gourd”) Durga and is visited on the third day. In and around Kashi, in the home people consecrate a round water pot, called a ghata or kalasha, which is an emblem of the auspicious presence of the Goddess throughout Navaratri.

Civic and religious organizations sponsor the construction of elaborate clay image, of Durga shaped on a frame of straw and bamboo and painted with precision. These beautiful images are consecrated at the beginning of the Nine Nights and become the dwelling place of the Goddess for these days. On the tenth day of the month on Vijaya Dashami—the day of her triamph over the Buffalo Demon—these images are taken out in procession to the Ganges and finally immerged.

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