Durga Puja 2025: What Is The Significance Of Dhunuchi Naach And Why Is It The Heartbeat Of Pujo Nights?

Durga Puja 2025 has Kolkata running on overload. Streets blink like constellations strung too low, pandals rise and vanish in days as if the city itself were building kingdoms on borrowed time, and the drums shake the night awake. Yet through the noise, one ritual grabs hold and won’t let go: Dhunuchi Naach. This isn’t just pretty choreography; it’s worship performed with fire in clay bowls, smoke pouring heavy into your lungs, and devotion dragged out of the body rather than whispered in prayer. 

Dhunuchi Naach 2025: Kolkata’s Fiery Devotional Dance Ritual

Dhunuchi Naach (Bengali: ধুনুচি নাচ) is a devotional dance ritual performed particularly during Durga Puja, especially in West Bengal and among Bengalis elsewhere. “Dhunuchi” refers to a censer/incense burner, and “Naach” (or “Nritya”) means dance.

At this dance’s core is a clay pot. That’s all! It is earthen, ordinary, and packed with husk and incense, but light it, and the pot betrays its ordinariness.

In practice, devotees hold dhunuchis or earthen and sometimes metal vessels, which are filled with burning coals or coconut husk and incense materials (“dhuno,” camphor, etc.) to produce fragrant smoke. It sputters and spits smoke in furious white swirls. In a dancer’s hand, it stops being the object and becomes a symbol. It is an offering, yes, but also a weapon and a line from an epic told without words.

And the sound, it doesn’t just accompany; it becomes the overwhelming spirit of the stage. The dhak’s relentless boom, the kansor’s clashing metallic sound and the ghanta’s sharp ringing become the driving force of movement. Layer piled on layer until the pandal itself vibrates like a struck drum. The rhythm leaks outward, impossible to resist.

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Durga Puja: Tradition, Fire, And Faith In Motion

Five minutes with one burning pot and your arms begin to tremble. Add the dhak, its pounding that doesn’t just mark rhythm but colonises your movement, and you understand why stamina here equals devotion. Men in dhotis carried this tradition for decades. Now women join them with their garad sarees flaring, movements cutting and flowing at once, and the ritual shifting in texture. 

Competitions crank it higher still: who lasts longest, who risks two or three dhunuchis at once, or who spins until fire blurs, but even in spectacle, the offering remains. Sweat, smoke, and flame never lose their spiritual weight.

Also Read: Five Dead As Kolkata Records Over 300 mm Rainfall; Widespread Flooding Halts Transport And Hampers Durga Puja Preparations

And when you leave, you don’t leave like you came. Your shirt reeks of incense, andyour  ears still ring from the dhak that refuses to fade. Dhunuchi Naach has no interest in order or tidiness. It lives because it overwhelms; it is messy and communal in nature because it makes belief tangible. And long after the embers blacken, the rhythm keeps hammering in your chest.

Cover Image Courtesy: bhuppigraphy/Wikipedia