Delhi-based illustrator Raj Kamal is known for taking cultural icons and giving them an unexpected twist. In his previous series, he took American superheroes including The Hulk, Flash, and Spiderman, and turned them into characters representing India’s sub-communities. This time around, he’s taken something that’s classically Indian, Durga Puja, and given it his own spin.

Durga Puja is the ceremonial worship of the mother goddess and is celebrated every year during the Hindu month of Ashwin (September-October). Its roots lie in the commemoration of Lord Rama’s invocation of the goddess before going in to battle with the demon king Ravana. Though popular throughout India, there is no state where is festival is more revered than West Bengal.

The idea for the project titled NAVADURGA: The Nine Forms of Goddess Durga came about while Kamal was researching Navratri and realised that Durga had nine avatars—Shailaputri, Bharmacharini, Chandraghanta, Kushmanda, Skanda Mata, and Katyayini— a different one for each day of Navratri. “I’m Bengali and have celebrated Durga Puja with my family ever since I was a child, but I had no idea that there were nine different avatars,” he said. “So, I thought that if I didn’t know, there was a good chance a lot of others didn’t as well, so I decided to create a few illustrations.”

His intentions behind the project were to spread awareness about this little known fact behind this widely-celebrated festival. The look Kamal settled on is vastly different from the regular depictions of Indian gods and goddesses that we’ve all grown up with. “I noticed that while there were depictions of the nine avatars available, all of them were very old-school. So I decided to modernise them, to make them contemporary,” he said.
He has drawn from traditional depictions and kept the big, heavy kohl-lined eyes of the goddess, but apart from that, these drawings are radically different from any other religious imagery there is to see.

Scroll down to see six of Kamal’s nine avatars of Durga

All images courtesy of Raj Kamal