Sitting atop her lion, the Hindu goddess Durga wields a celestial weapon in each of her 10 hands. But her target isn’t the usual demon of deceit, Mahishasura.
She’s taking aim at a different perceived foe representing the forces of evil: a striking figure with a blond coif, a rippling torso and a face modeled on US President Donald Trump.
Unveiled last week in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal during the Hindu festival of Durga Puja, known as Durga Pujo by Bengali Hindus, the sculpture’s symbolism was impossible to ignore.
In a celebration that honors the triumph of good over evil, the statue was more than just political satire. It was a symbol of a once tightly woven friendship now frayed by Trump’s attempts to reshape global trade.
“India and America had good relations previously but ever since Trump has come, he’s trying to suppress India, to push us over, to squash us,” Sanjay Basak, a member of the organizing committee of the Durga Puja installment in the city of Murshidabad, told CNN. “That’s why we have depicted Trump as this demon, vanquished by the powerful mother Durga.”
During the five-day festival of Durga Puja, entire cities transform into a sprawling, open-air art gallery where the mythological battle between the goddess and her demon is reimagined to reflect contemporary anxieties.
Over the years, these installations have tackled everything from the migrant crisis to wars with neighboring Pakistan.
“Osama Bin Laden had been a popular choice post 9/11,” said Sushovan Sircar, a consultant who makes social media reels about Bengali culture and spends his time between New Delhi and Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal state.
After deadly border clashes between India and China in 2020, another installation famously depicted Chinese leader Xi Jinping in the villain’s role, pushing the boundaries of diplomatic commentary through religious art.
“It is in this vein that a pandal (pavilion) decided to depict Trump as an asur (demon), as an ostensible expression of a popular sentiment of the people,” Sircar said.
Cracks in the relationship
It wasn’t always this way.
Six years ago, Trump stood hand in hand with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Houston’s NRG Stadium as thunderous chants from 50,000 people celebrated two right-wing populists with a shared flair for turning diplomatic relations into grand spectacles.
The show of political partnership known as the “Howdy Modi!” rally was mirrored at the subsequent “Namaste Trump” event in Ahmedabad in Gujarat the following February, solidifying a public narrative of a seemingly unbreakable personal alliance.
But lately their friendship has been tested by Trump’s return to office.
Earlier this year, Trump publicly derided New Delhi, labeling the Indian economy as “dead” while imposing some of the administration’s highest-ever tariffs on the nation.
Half of the 50% levies are Trump’s punishment for India’s ramped-up purchases of Russian oil following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. The other half are part of Trump’s signature “America First” campaign to reduce US trade deficits.
India shot back, calling the tariffs “unfair” and “unjustified,” while pointing out the hypocrisy of Trump’s move. US and Europe, it said, still trade with Russia on other products such as fertilizers and chemicals.
But the Trump administration doubled down. A White House official in August described Russia’s war in Ukraine as “Modi’s war,” ramping up pressure on New Delhi to cut economic ties with the Kremlin. India repeatedly defended its purchases of Russian crude and called the statement “inaccurate and misleading.”
Then in September, Trump’s surprise order to impose a $100,000 fee for H-1B visa applications felt to many like a personal attack on Indian talent and ambition, as the largest group of beneficiaries of the skilled-worker program.
It is this sense of betrayal that found a potent artistic outlet in the form of the demon statue.
“Trump as Mahishasura is serving a political message to the people who are visiting the pandal (pavilion) and the mass media organizations who are covering it,” said Kolkata resident Tuneer Mukherjee.
This blending of art and politics is characteristic of Bengali culture, he said, offering a simple but powerful message: Trump and his administration’s “regressive agenda” have become the modern demon to be slain by the divine mother, Durga.
For three months, Basak, from the organizing committee of the Trump installation, said their team worked in near-total secrecy, a deliberate tactic to create an element of suspense ahead of its reveal.
“The identity of the demon was a closely guarded secret,” he said. So closely, in fact, that the final, unmistakable features of Trump were only sculpted in the last seven days, hidden from view until the final moment.
When a video of the completed installation surfaced online, the response was electric, said Basak. “Thousands and thousands” of people flocked to the pavilion, forming queues that snaked through the neighborhood, he added.
For Basak, the overwhelming turnout was validation. “It really is something that resonated with a lot of people,” he said, “or at least, something everyone wanted to see for themselves.”
Bengal’s history of dissent
In West Bengal, art has never been just about decoration; it is a language for dialogue, a weapon for dissent, and the primary medium for social and political debate.
As a hotbed of resistance against its British colonizers, Bengal’s freedom struggle was fought as much with ideas as with weapons.
It was poet and novelist Bankim Chandra Chatterjee who gave the movement its rallying cry with the song “Vande Mataram” (Hail to the Motherland), while the work of Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore infused the resistance with its intellectual and spiritual soul.
This deep-seated political consciousness didn’t fade with independence. It was further institutionalized during more than three decades of local communist party governance, and today, its legacy unfolds on the streets.
This towering statue of Trump is one of several politically charged installations that depicted the US leader or symbols of his economic agenda as the demon.
Worshipped by millions of Hindus as the mother of the universe, the goddess Durga embodies a powerful duality: her spear and club symbolize both fierce prowess and delicate motherliness.
And within India’s Bengali community, particularly in its cultural epicenter of West Bengal, Durga Puja has evolved beyond a purely religious celebration into one of the region’s most deliberate forms of public discourse and socio-political commentary.
“This kind of critique and social commentary is something that’s a part of our culture,” said Basak, from the Trump installation’s organizing committee.
“Now that Trump is just imposing tariffs upon tariffs upon tariffs, this is the big issue of the day. So, it’s only apt that we should depict it as such.”