Ganpati festival: Transformation through ages

Ganpati festival: Transformation through ages
13 Sep, 2008, 0026 hrs IST,Vikram Doctor, ET Bureau
Print EMail Discuss New Bookmark/Share
Bookmark / Share
Del.icio.us Google Bookmarks
Facebook Yahoo MyWeb
StumbleUpon Reddit
More
Save Write to Editor Single page view
Ganesh festival
Getting a taxi outside Mumbai’s crowded Byculla station can be a problem and it wasn’t any easier 123 years ago. In her journal for 17th September 1885 Nora Scott, the wife of a Bombay High Court judge, records how, along with an Army Major friend, she was trying to find a carriage when they were stopped by the carts of a Hindu procession: “All round the cart were man carrying little plaster images.

‘Gunpatties’, exclaimed the Major and I at the same time. So they were — funny little clay figures, pinkish or yellowish — they always give their gods fair complexions. This god Gunpatti has a long elephant nose and the dress was of gauze and tinsel.”

As with today, some of the depictions were elaborate — Scott notes one with clay figurines of women spinning around. Rather oddly she notes that the poorest people, who could not afford idols, just carried empty chairs, presumably for the god.

And just as today the processions seemed endless: “Procession after procession carrying gunpatties came along the streets.

It was nearly 5.00 O’clock and I suppose the devotees were all on their way to the sea — to dip the gunpatties in the water.” But there was one difference: “Only a few of the most zealous worshippers throw the god in altogether and lose it — most of them think enough to dip him in the sea and bring him back to serve for another year.”

Scott’s description of the Ganapati festival (taken from her diaries, published by her grandson in 1994 as An Indian Journal) is not just an early description of the festival which will reach its height in Mumbai this weekend.

They also indicate how Ganesha with his instantly recognisable elephant head has always been the Hindu god most easily identifiable by non-Indians.

Only perhaps Krishna with his lover-boy appeal and orange robed acolytes chanting his name in foreign streets might come close and perhaps Shiva with his untamed appearance and aura of violence.

Robert Oppenheimer is famously said to have uttered a verse from the Bhagavad Gita invoking Shiva as he watched the first atomic bomb explode in the Arizona desert, but it was Shiva’s son who oversaw a more modern and benign revolution when, in 1995, the news that he was drinking milk spread instantly across the world.

It was one of the first demonstrations of the power of global connectivity, and also affirmed global knowledge of Ganesha. Even Bridget Jones took note, bonding in one of her books with her Mr Darcy after hearing of Ganesha drinking milk and replicating it with an earthen jar!

Such views of Ganesha are mostly benign, focusing on his obstacle removing abilities and promotion of prosperity. But this was not how he was first perceived by Western visitors to India.

As Partha Mitter notes in Much Maligned Monsters, his study of European reactions to Indian art, their instinctive reaction was to see idols as horrifying or demonic particularly when the gods were zoomorphic, meaning either in the form of animals or with parts of animals like Ganesha: “From the very beginning zoolatry was either plainly disliked or some justification was found for it.”

Mitter quotes the description of gods in a temple in Cambay by Pietro della Valle, an Italian traveller and scholar who was genuinely interested in Hindu traditions, and who felt there had to be symbolic meaning under the perceived absurdity:

“Another had the head of an Elephant and was called Ganescio.... Some of the Idolets say upon Sundry Animals, as Tygers and the like, and even upon Rats; of which things the foolish and ignorant Indians relate ridiculous stories.

But I doubt not that, under the veil of these Fables, their ancient Sages (most parsimonious of the Sciences, as all Barbarians ever were) have hid from the vulgar many secrets...”

Missionaries were less interested in understanding, and it suited them to have scary stories to relate back home to underline the importance of their mission in saving ‘heathens’ from worshipping animal headed gods.

Mitter describes how an early Western image of Ganesha was created by mistakenly combining a Jesuit report, from 1533, of the main Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva trimurti at Elephanta, with another Jesuit report from 1560 of an elephant headed God.

It appeared in a popular book of that time, Vincenzo Cartari’s Images of the Gods, which presented the ‘barbaric pantheon’, and was updated in 1615 by the scholar Lorenzo Pignoria to include the new discoveries of Indian, Japanese and Mexican gods.

The illustration showed a Ganesha with three legs, three arms and three elephant heads! A later example, by French engraver Bernard Picart in 1723, shows an elephant headed god of wisdom with the legs of a goat, rather like the Greek god Pan.

More scholarly contact with India corrected such mistakes, and brought out Ganesha’s benign side. Already by Picart’s time his association with wisdom and literature was being made, and as scholars translated the Indian epics, this aspect of Ganesha became better known, particularly as Vyas’ scribe for the Mahabharata.

This spirit was what Fanny Parkes evoked in her memoirs Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque, which William Dalrymple has described as “the most exuberant and enjoyable travel book to come out of the south Asia of the East India Company.”

Parkes was that rarity, a British lady who, far from being afraid of India, fell in love with it, even liking the climate of Calcutta. She soon escaped from the life expected of a minor Company official’s wife and travelled across India, learning the sitar, giving some of the first Western descriptions of zenana life and even criticising aspects of British rule.

It was well within character then for her to start her memoirs with a poetic dedication to both her mother and Ganesha!

It reads, in part: “Work-perfecting Ganeshu! Salamat/ Ganesh! — Ganesh!/ Two-mothered! One-toothed! / Portly-paunched! Elephant-faced Ganeshu! Salam... Thou who art invoked on commencement of a journey, the writing of a book / Salam!!” After a bit more, she ends on a charming personal note: “God of Prudence and Policy! / Patron of Literature! / Salam!! / May it be said, / ‘Ah! she writes like Ganesh!’”

During Parkes’ time most foreigners in India were there to work or, like her, because they were married to someone who was. But as British rule in India stabilised into the order of the Raj casual visitors started appearing in the form of tourists brought by pioneering travel agents like Thomas Cook.

An encounter with Ganesha was on their travel itinerary, as Mark Twain instructed in Following the Equator, his travel book which offers a sardonic American corrective to the British tendency to either romanticise or criticise.

Twain described Benaras as a religious supermarket where “every conceivable earthly and heavenly good is procurable under one roof, so to speak — a sort of Army and Navy Stores, theologically stocked.” Ganesha was one more heavenly good on offer: “Protection Against Hunger. Next, you must fortify yourself against the sorrowful earthly ill just named.

This you will do by worshipping for a moment in the Cow Temple. By the door of it you will find an image of Ganesh, son of Shiva; it has the head of an elephant on a human body; its face and hands are of silver. You will worship it a little, and pass on...”

Twain doesn’t mention purchasing Ganesha idols, but this surely must have been done by many tourists. Such idols would have indicated that their owner was well-travelled or cosmopolitan, which is why in Western stories you occasionally encounter a description of a Ganesha idol, alongside other Asian deities like Buddha or the Chinese goddess of mercy Kwai-Lin.

Ganesha was becoming an Asian brand, instantly recognisable, exotic but not too threatening, and with suitably benign and calming influences that could be ascribed to him. The continued popularity of the image appearing, often to the distress of orthodox Hindus, on everything from T-shirts to hand-bags, shows how enduring this brand appeal is.

Yet there were reminders of his more complex, even fearsome side. Rudyard Kipling could always be counted on to provide pictures of India that might seem simple, but have complex and contradictory depths, perhaps even more than he intended.

His story The Bridge Builders is an excellent example, one of his best Indian stories, with that characteristic Kipling mix of the macho and the slightly mad, with offensive yet deeply sympathetic views of India and a final message that might seem tritely modern if it was not undercut by an acknowledgement of darker, more ancient forces.

The story takes place on the site of a bridge being built across the Ganges, a setting that allows Kipling much chance for enjoyable enumeration of engineering details. The British engineer and his Indian foreman are the protagonists and their job is almost done when a great flood that could wash it away.

They can only hope it stays, and take refuge in an abandoned temple on a river island. Under the influence of the opium which the foreman persuades him to take, the engineer dreams that the flood is Mother Ganga’s attempt to break the chains of the bridge, and that she has come to the temple, in the shape of a great river crocodile, to demand help from the other Hindu gods.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/News/PoliticsNation/Ganpati_festival_Transformation_through_ages/articleshow/3477637.cms