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Next: about 17 to 20 Oct 2026

Durga Puja and the Bengali sweet shop

Four days of pandals in Bengal, when sandesh, rasgulla and other chhena sweets are bought by the box and offered as bhog.

Durga Puja, also called Durgotsava, is an annual Hindu festival in the Indian subcontinent that reveres the goddess Durga. It is particularly popular in West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, Assam, Tripura, Bangladesh a
Photo: Subhrajyoti07, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Cheeses for Durga Puja and the Bengali sweet shop

In Kolkata and across Bengal, Durga Puja is as much about food as about the goddess. Bengali sweets are almost all made from chhena, fresh curd cheese kneaded smooth by hand: sandesh is pressed into moulds and flavoured with nolen gur (date-palm jaggery) or cardamom, rasgulla is poached in light syrup, and pantua and ledikeni are fried before soaking. Sweets are offered to the goddess, shared in the pandals and carried home. On Bijoya Dashami, the last day, families visit one another and no visit is complete without a plate of mishti. Chhena-making is a household skill as well as a trade in Bengal.

The cheeses

ChhenaKneaded fresh curd, the base of almost every Bengali sweet.PaneerPressed curd for the savoury dishes of the puja meals.
About this page

Written by the EveryCheese desk with AI assistance. Background: "Durga Puja" on Wikipedia. Customs differ from place to place and family to family. If this is your tradition and we have it wrong, tell us.

Photo credits on this page

The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.

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