Nearly every form of the goddess worshipped through Navratri — a Hindu festival symbolising the victory of good over evil — comes with an animal, from lions and a tiger to a bull and a donkey, and several of those animals still live in India’s forests, wetlands and deserts.

This year’s Navratri — named for the celebration spread over nine nights — began on 11 October, with Durga Ashtami on 18 October, Maha Navami on 19 October and Vijayadashami on 20 October, according to the local calendar. Worshippers honour the nine forms of Durga known as Navadurga.

Durga riding on a tiger in triumph with Bhairava and Hanuman. Photo: Chasmanuyr Pres. Source: Wellcome collection

In the standard listing of Navadurga on Wikipedia, Shailaputri rides the bull Nandi, Chandraghanta a tiger, Kushmanda and Skandamata a lion, Kalaratri a donkey and Mahagauri an ox, while Brahmacharini has no mount and Siddhidatri sits on a lotus. Katyayani is shown on a lion there, though the travel site Trip to Temples puts her on a tiger and gives Mahagauri the Nandi bull, so the listings do not always agree.

Trip to Temples reads each animal as a quality: courage, fearlessness and valour for the lion, justice, ferocity and the removal of obstacles for the tiger, guardianship, strength and auspiciousness for the bull, and humility, simplicity and protection for the donkey.

Durga herself is usually shown riding a lion or a tiger. In the Mahishasura legend the Himalayas, personified as Himavan, give her a lion, and Wikipedia notes that the scholar Asko Parpola describes a seal from Kalibangan as showing a war goddess associated with the tiger. Bengal keeps the lion even though the animal is foreign to the region, according to an article on Jawhar Sircar’s website, which says early images commissioned by zamindars showed a “lion” that looks more like a horse or donkey and that real lions reached Kolkata only in the 1880s, when the city’s zoo was established.

Buffalo Demon

Durga Slaying Mahisha, the mythic buffalo demon. Photo credit: Edward L. Whittemore Fund. https://clevelandart.org/art/1955.667. This file is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

The animal that Durga defeats is a buffalo. In the popular legend, Mahishasura, a half-buffalo demon, wins a boon from Brahma that only a woman can kill him, and the gods pool their energies to create the warrior goddess who does. He keeps changing form during the fight, and she kills him with her trident while he is turning into a buffalo.

The Devi Mahatmya, which scholars date to between 400 and 600 CE, describes his shape-shifting and her calm answer to it, and a relief at Mamallapuram in Tamil Nadu carved around 630–674 CE shows her slaying him. Wikipedia says the demonic forces he symbolises are shape-shifting and adapting in nature, form and strategy, and that in the Shakta tradition the battles are read as metaphors for the divine and the demonic within each person.

Pili Nalike, or tiger dance of Tulunadu performed during Navratri, coastal Karnataka. Photo: Fana2012. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

In the south the story is written into a city’s name. Mysuru comes from Mahishuru, which means the abode of Mahisha in Kannada, and its Chamundi Hill temple belongs to Chamundeshwari, the goddess said to have killed him. The Mysuru Dasara, introduced by Raja Wodeyar I in 1610, runs for ten days and ends on Vijayadashami with a procession in which an idol of Chamundeshwari is carried on a decorated elephant.

Living Animals

Gujarat’s Asiatic lions numbered 891 in the 2025 count, up from 674 five years earlier, and 507 of them were living outside Gir National Park and Wildlife Sanctuary across 11 districts of Saurashtra, according to figures from the Gujarat Forest Department reported by Down To Earth. India’s 2022 national estimate put the tiger population at 3,682, within a range of 3,167 to 3,925.

The nearest wild counterpart of the buffalo demon is the wild water buffalo, which the IUCN Red List has classed as Endangered since 1986, with fewer than 4,000 mature individuals estimated worldwide. In India it survives largely in Assam’s Kaziranga, Manas and Dibru-Saikhowa national parks and a few other pockets, and interbreeding with domestic buffalo is among the threats it faces.

Kalaratri’s donkey has a wild relative in the Indian wild ass, which numbered 7,672 in the 2024 survey, up from 6,082 in 2020, mainly in the Little Rann and Great Rann of Kutch in Gujarat, according to Deccan Herald.

Sources: Business Today: Navratri 2026 calendar · Wikipedia: Navadurga · Wikipedia: Durga · Trip to Temples: Vahanas of Navdurga · Curious anomalies in Bengal’s Durga worship · Wikipedia: Mysore · Down To Earth: Asiatic lion count · UnderstandUPSC: All India Tiger Estimation 2022 · Wikipedia: Wild water buffalo · Deccan Herald: Indian wild ass count