Purpose of Conducting Ganesh Utsav Lost Among the Masses

When Lokmanya Tilak started the Sarvajanik Ganeshotsav - public worship and celebrations – to gather people so the British couldn’t prohibit it – he started it with a small idol, of some two feet tall, and in the compound of a house, Vinchurkarwada. Later, he shifted it to his own, Kesariwada, where the public event continues to be held.

The year after Tilak started it, and Keshavji Naik’s chawl set up Mumbai’s first public Ganapathi, it too was not on the roadsides, or even blocking the entire stretches of roads, which is not common to Maharashtra alone. That idol too is small, just like it is in Kesariwada. In the past three decades, it has spread to many a place, with a lot of song and dance about it, literally.

Lokmanya Tilak started the Sarvajanik Ganeshotsav - public worship and celebrations – to gather people so the British couldn’t prohibit it – he started it with a small idol, of some two feet tall, and in the compound of a house.

With the festivities to commence in three weeks from now, the air is thick with it – orders for the idols, preparations for the pandals, permissions sought for putting them up, or just erecting them without any leave from the civic bodies. Last year’s fines for violations of regulated chaos are being excused. The civic bodies are being targeted for poor roads.

As every year, this time also the roads in towns and cities are a scandal. To use a cliché, if astronauts were to see them, they could understandably take them to be the lunar craters. The organisers of the festivities in the urban nooks and crannies are fearful that potholes would pose a risk to the idols when ceremoniously brought for worship and then taken out for immersion.

The federation of organisers have issued an ultimatum to the civic bodies to get the roads in proper trim, and in this annual practice, the civic bodies promise and patch up the roads as best as they could, the bad repairs being explained away as inevitable during rains. None has satisfactorily explained why they go bad in the first place. Contractors who have minted, and conniving elements of civic body, laugh in their sleeves.

This outrage at the condition of the roads are met promptly than when the courts order the civic bodies to pull up their socks. However, this time, the civic bodies may have to reckon with the Bombay High Court which said freedom to religion did not mean denying other citizens their rights for basic rights – proper roads and footpaths which are colonised by the pandals.

In short, a bench of two judges has ordered that these kind of public religious activities- Ganpathy, Dahi Handi during Gokulashtami, the Navratri – which trouble the citizens should be taken away from the streets, and asked the government to curtail it. It has also said that there is no religious prescription that azans should be rendered via loudspeakers. These are not merely significant, but landmark judial pronouncements. But politicians are already murmuring against the court.

They do not want to take the Ganapathy back indoors, because, apart from being a time mostly of revelry and less of religion – I have known a colony where after the nominal puja, the women walked a catwalk! – but a huge political platform. Politicians either fund it, or the smaller ones in their tiny turfs make it by collecting contributions.

Ganesh festivities are no more the kind of platform that Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak conceptualised and created, but completely vulgarised.

It is no more the kind of platform that Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak conceptualised and created, but completely vulgarised, and not for the purpose he had in mind. Those days, there would be even public education at the pandals inside the wadas. Now that such huge compounds are not available, grounds and halls could well be the alternative and eliminate encroachments.

But anybody who is somebody, or wants to be one, and has political aspirations or is already one, even if petty one on a small local turf, defies the regulations already in place and organises the nine-day long event. It is they must do, they think, like organising Dahi Handi or the Navrartri garba. If there is one thing that is missing in the routines, it is piety.

Mahesh Vijapurkar