Today’s the day that marks the beginning of the end of life as we know it if you’re either Bengali or live in a Bengali neighbourhood. It’s Mahalaya, which means Durga Puja is between four to five days away. Consequently, the average Bengali, who has spent the past week shimmering with excitement at the idea of wearing new clothes and all the food stalls that will be set up in puja pandals — as though they have basically been wearing rags and starving till date — is jubilant for reasons that have nothing to do with #SurgicalStrike.

Pitru Paksha may have ended with Mahalaya, but this remains an inauspicious period for anyone who lives in a Bengali-dominated neighbourhood — if you were expecting to carry on with your normal routine while your friendly neighbourhood Bengali frolicked, have a fish fry. Because that’s about all Bangla culture has to offer you by way of a silver lining. In about 48 hours, the neighbourhood will become a labyrinth and the traffic snarls that paralyse your commute during the days of Durga Puja may well make you wonder whether it wouldn’t have been a good thing if Mahisasura had been allowed his rampage. At least it would have meant no Durga Puja traffic.

But that’s in the future. Today is the day that marks a modern miracle. There’s a ritual that’s associated with Mahalaya for many: listening to Mahisasuramardini, a 90-minute musical programme that weaves together songs about Durga and passages from Chandipath. Written by Bani Kumar, composed by the legendary Pankaj Mullick and recited by Birendra Krishna Bhadra, Mahisasuramardini was first performed and broadcasted from Kolkata’s All India Radio (AIR, also known as Akashvani) in 1936. Not a Mahalaya has passed since when at 4am, Mahisasuramardini has not been aired. It was performed live well into the 1960s and after that, a recording would be played.

For many, Bhadra’s voice — droning, slightly nasal, clogged with the righteous melodrama and just not the kind of tone you want whispering in your ear — marks the beginning of Puja. Despite its lack of pleasantness, there’s something incredibly powerful about Bhadra’s recitation. He’s able to hold on to the rigid tones of mantras and infuse it with feeling. There are sections, perfectly complemented by Mullick’s background score, that still raise goosebumps. Bhadra’s voice is so integral a part of Mahisasuramardini that when in 1974, AIR got actor Uttam Kumar to read the narration, listeners wrinkled their noses at it. No one has dared mess with Mahisasuramardini since.

Old-timers will say that it’s Mullick’s genius that has made Mahisasuramardini a legend and it’s true that Mullick’s compositions are magnificent. However, the reason why Mahisasuramardini has been heard by approximately four generations of Bengalis is the radio. Mahisasuramardini is a ritual that was born of the marriage of technology and state-owned mass media. You didn’t have to get out of the house, you didn’t have to earn entry into another space. You just had to wake up (at 4am) and turn on the radio. It was an AIR broadcast and a community activity. There’s an openness to this ritual, an ease of access, that is particularly fitting to a puja that is known as “sarbojanin” (for all members of society). Yes, it was state-owned media streaming Hinduism into homes, but there were no prescriptions in this programme and neither was there any menacing subtext. There was music, myth and a ritual that needed no priest — only a radio and an alarm clock.

Like all rituals, this one too has its bit of brainwashing. I remember my parents excitedly buying a cassette version and not opening it. Because how could you play Mahisasuramardini on a day other than Mahalaya? When they did finally put it on, my father looked wistfully at the Bose speakers that were his pride and joy, and said, “It sounds wrong.” Mahisasuramardini for him and countless others needed to heard on the radio. Having one’s own copy of it, rather than being dependent on state media to access it, didn’t feel right. Mahisasuramardini wasn’t his to own. The magic was in listening to it while knowing you weren’t the only one doing so — an invisible connection forged by sound and the crackling noise of the AIR broadcast.

There was a curious combination of openness and autocracy in state media like AIR. On one hand, you the listener didn’t have any choice. At 4am on Mahalaya today, you could watch old episodes of a sitcom, news, a movie, listen to Mahisasuramardini or do all of the above. For about 60 of the 80 years that Mahisasuramardini has been an annual tradition, listeners had two options: listen or sleep.

Yet, with the lack of choice came a certain freedom for some. Pankaj Mullick and Bani Kumar made the programme that they wanted to — and in its time, it would have been expensive to produce, considering the orchestral score and the number of well-known singers Mullick roped into the project — and because there was nothing but AIR, it got heard. Had Mahisasuramardini been a dud (like so many other Akashvani productions), it would have been forgotten. Instead, it continues to be heard even today and there are multiple uploads on YouTube for those who had better things to do this morning at 4am, Indian Standard Time, than stream or tune in to AIR. The fact that the programme is still heard is a legacy that has a lot to do with how little choice the listener had back when there was nothing but state media. The good stuff had a chance to seed itself in memory and grow roots, while today, so much that is as beautifully and lovingly made as Mahisasuramardini just gets lost in the glut of options before us.

We’re in the age of ‘infotainment’ in the 21st century, with talent and money being pumped into this industry because everyone knows just how influential culture is. And yet how much of what we see on television or access on the internet can you imagine becoming an annual ritual that survives more than 80 years?

The truth is I don’t end up searching for Mahisasuramardini on YouTube when I wake up on Mahalaya because it’s a brilliant programme. It’s special to me because of the stories its swaddled in —  of my parents, uncles, aunts, grandparents huddling around the radio as a family. I listen to Bhadra droning on and I feel the little tingles of excitement that my father felt as he realised that in just a few days, festivity and holidays would be here. Even though I’m not listening to it at 4am, as the program builds up to its crescendo, I remember my mother and grandmother telling me how they’d marvel at Mullick having paced Mahisasuramardini to be perfectly in tune with the way twilight turned to light. My grandparents with their idiosyncrasies, my uncles without the weariness of age and with a sepia twinkle of youth; people whose faces are blurred, relatives I’ve never met and known only through family legends — we’re all sitting at an imaginary radio as Mahisasuramardini tells us a story we don’t really need to be retold.

For those 90 minutes, thanks to memory and Akashvani, all of us are together.