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