Devotees throng Sivasagar Kalibari Kali Mandir on Kali Puja

HT Correspondent
SIVASAGAR, Oct 25: Though a cyclonic storm triggering continuous drizzle dampened the Deepawali spirit among the people here, thousands thronged the historic Kalibari Kalimandir on the auspicious occasion of Kalipuja where puja is performed in the mandir with traditional rituals every year.
The devotees lit earthen lamps under the Bakul tree, and offered sacrificial goats, pigeons, white gourd, etc., on the altar of the century-old Ma Kali’s stone idol, known to be one of the oldest in the state. The head priest, Navajyoti Sarma performed the puja. The celebration committee with Niren Sarma as the president and Jiten Goswami as the secretary made elaborate arrangements for the devotees and also organised various cultural programmes for the day in the memory of late Monorama Phukan.
Kali puja in Kalibari here has a special significance among the devotees as the stone idol was unearthed in the very spot in 1925/26 where the mandir now exists. According to the elders of the Baruah family of the temple premises, the woman of the family felt something hard when she was mopping the front yard of her house. Then, Goddess Kali appeared to her husband Birajananda Boruah in his dream, the owner of the plot. Baruah told the neighbours of the dream and the neighbours accordingly recovered the massive single stone cut-out idol of Goddess Kali from the surface of the land. They all started worshipping the idol under a thatched roof for some years and finally constructed the mandir in 1931.
The idol is similar to the stone idol of the goddess Durga in Deopani, Karbi Anglong. It still surprises many how it came to be there far from the hills.
According to the local devotees, Swargadeo Shiva Singha after 1741 might have brought it to Rangpur, the erstwhile capital city of the great Ahoms. It subsequently got buried in the massive earthquake that devastated upper Assam in 1834 and the Dikhow river altered its course further west.