A city & its festival

Bombay will turn into a bride for the next 10 days as it celebrates the Ganapati festival.

It’s a celebration that has come to define the city both negatively – crass, commercial, loud and gaudy, and positively – bringing about community camaraderie, remembering the values of freedom, independence, self-reliance, and rising above casteism.  

These days, Ganapati celebrations are held across India, most notably in Hyderabad, but it’s Bombay that really takes the festival to a different level.

Bombay’s identification with the festival is a bit surprising considering when it was started in 1893 by Bal Gangadhar Tilak, it was held in three venues in Poona and only one in Bombay.

But students of history will agree that Bombay was known to frequently steal Poona’s thunder in the late 19th century. For instance, the first session of the Indian National Congress launched by Allan Octavio Hume was to be held in Poona in 1885, but had to be moved to Bombay because of the sudden outbreak of the plague in Poona.

Tilak started the public celebration of the festival in 1893 largely to resuscitate his dwindling political fortunes.  As the leader of orthodox Hindus, he had met a series of political reversals – the biggest being the passage of the age of consent bill by the English governor Sir Andrew Scoble, raising the marriageable age for girls from 10 to 12.

Historian B. R. Nanda, tracing the uneasy relationship between the moderates and the extremist elements of the Indian national movement in the 19th century has observed, “Pherozeshah Mehta, Dinshaw Wacha, and indeed the entire Bombay group of moderates had a lively distrust of Tilak. Its origins lay partly in ideological and partly in temperamental differences. For at least fifteen years there had been a sort of cold war, which hindered not only mutual understanding, but even mutual comprehension between the Congress establishment in India – of which Pherozeshah Mehta was the virtual chief – and Tilak.”

In the first year, the Sarvajanik Ganeshotsav was held at three centres in Pune and at the Keshavji Naik chawl, Girgaum in Bombay. It was widely perceived as directed against the Muslims of Bombay. However, A year later, In October 1894, the English acting commissioner of the central division of Mumbai, commenting on the festival wrote to his seniors: "I must confess that my convictions lead to me to support the view widely entertained in Poona by the more respectable natives that the agitation fomented by the Deccan Brahmins is directed in reality not against the Muslims but against the government."

To read about the history of that tumultuous era, click here.
 

Many writers have described this festival and Bombay’s unique relationship with it. And none has done it better than Salman Rushdie. Here are two passages from his two best novels: Midnight’s Children and The Moor’s Last Sigh.

“Our Bombay, Padma! It was very different then, there were no night-clubs or pickle factories or Oberoi-Sheraton Hotels or movie studios; but the city grew at breakneck speed, acquiring a cathedral and an equestrian statue of the Mahratta warrior-king Sivaji which (we used to think) came to life at night and galloped awesomely through the city streets-right along Marine Drive! On Chowpatty sands! Past the great houses on Malabar Hill, round Kemp's Corner, giddily along the sea to Scandal Point! And yes, why not, on and on, down my very own Warden Road, right alongside the segregated swimming pools of Breach Candy, right up to huge Mahalaxmi Temple and the old Willingdon Club…

As for Mumbadevi – she’s not so popular these days, having been replaced by elephant-headed Ganesh in the people's affections. The calendar of festivals reveals her decline: Ganesh – ‘Ganpati Baba’ – has his day of Ganesh Chaturthi, when huge processions are 'taken out' and march to Chowpatty bearing plaster effigies of the god, which they hurl into the sea. Ganesh's day is a rain-making ceremony, it makes the monsoon possible, and it, too, was celebrated in the days before my arrival at the end of the ticktock countdown – but where is Mumbadevi's day? It is not on the calendar.”

  
Midnight’s Children

“Once a year, the gods came to Chowpatty Beach to bathe in the filthy sea: fat-bellied idols by the thousand, papier-mâché effigies of the elephant-headed deity Ganesha or Ganpati Bappa, swarming towards the water astride papier-mâché rats – for Indian rats, as we know, carry gods as well as plagues. Some of these tusk'n'tail duos were small enough to be borne on human shoulders, or cradled in human arms; others were the size of small mansions, and were pulled along on great-wheeled wooden carts by hundreds of disciples. There were, in addition, many Dancing Ganeshas, and it was these wiggle-hipped Ganpatis, love-handled and plump of gut, against whom Aurora competed, setting her profane gyrations against the jolly jiving of the much-replicated god. Once a year, the skies were full of Colour-by-De Luxe clouds: pink and purple, magenta and vermilion, saffron and green, these powder-clouds, squirted from reused insecticide guns, or floating down from some bursting balloon-cluster wafting across the sky, hung in the air above the deities 'like aurora-not borealis-but-bombayalis', as the painter Vasco Miranda used to say.”

The Moor’s Last Sigh

I’ve been fascinated with the festival since I was a child, and vividly remember standing on the balcony of my mother’s home at Prathna Samaj watching the processions of Ganapati idols vending their way to the Chowpatty beach for the immersion of the idols into the Arabian Sea at the end of the ten-day festival.

Over the years, even as religion has lost its relevance to my life, I continue to enjoy the festival, and especially the way it transforms to the mammon-worshiping metropolis into a city that comes together to be good.

Ganapati is worshipped as the god of knowledge, and is the first scribe who recorded the Mahabharata as Ved Vyas narrated the epic.

Incidentally, 1893 is also the year when Mohandas Gandhi left Gujarat for South Africa and returned two decades later to become the Mahatma.

That year, Swami Vivekananda also addressed the World Congress of Religion in Chicago, addressing the congregation with the now famous salutation of ‘Sisters and Brothers of America’, leaving the largely Caucasian audience bemused presumably because it had never been addressed thus. 

They gave him a resounding standing ovation.
 

Reflections on a Saturday afternoon…

150th anniversary of Swami Vivekananda

At a recent lecture in Toronto, MJ Akbar said when Jawaharlal Nehru was asked by a western journalist what was his biggest achievement, he had noted the passing of the Hindu Code Bill. That India’s first prime minister should consider the empowerment of Hindu women a bigger achievement than India’s independence is indicative of the man’s true character. It also underscores the struggle within the Hindu society for social reforms.

(Read MJ Akbar's column on the subject Guardians of the pulpit)

That the mere passage of laws didn't (and doesn't) lead to any significant improvement in women’s status in the society is an altogether different matter.

Anyone familiar with 19th century social and political history of India will know of two very clear streams within the Hindu society – one which advocated that social reforms should be a priority, and the other section that resisted western-inspired and British-instituted reform measures. This section wasn't opposed to reforms. They wanted the reforms to be generated from within the Hindu society.  

That the Hindu society didn't (and doesn't) have any self-regulatory mechanism to have initiated this process is evident from the severe opposition Nehru faced during the codification of the Hindu personal laws.

Balwantrao Gangadhar Tilak (after Sant Dnyaneshwar and Shivaji Maharaj, the tallest Marathi manoos of all times, and after him Babasaheb Ambedkar and then Sachin Tendulkar?) belonged to the latter group that was opposed to British-led social reforms. 

His response to his gradual eclipse from public sphere in the late 1880s and the passage of the Age of Consent Bill in 1891 (which raised the marriageable age for girls from 10 to 12) was to launch the public celebration of the 10-day Ganapati festival in 1893 – the same year that Swami Vivekananda delivered the rousing speech at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago.

Vivekananda didn’t belong to either school of thought although he was a strong advocate of social reforms based on inherent strengths in the Hindu society. And while Vivekananda was not directly involved with the political aspect of the freedom movement, the Ramakrishna Mission became a hotbed of extremist nationalists from 1880s onward.

It is difficult to straitjacket Tilak or Vivekananda. 

Today, more than a century later, both Tilak and Vivekananda divide Indians, with both the secular and the communal elements claiming them as their ideals. History is reinterpreted by both the groups to justify these claims. It isn't such a bad thing because it is only through revisionism that we uncover new and concealed facts about the past. 

Of course, there are innumerable quotes that can be reproduced to portray both Tilak and Vivekananda as votaries of Hindu nationalism. A contributing factor – especially in Vivekananda’s case – is the whole scale usurpation of his ideology and thinking by the Hindutva brigade. In Tilak’s case they don’t do so probably because Tilak’s collaboration with Jinnah in 1916 for the Lucknow Pact.

About Tilak, historian BR Nanada, has said, “(Tilak) has probably suffered no less at the hands of uncritical admirers, who have tended to present him not as a flesh-and-blood politician, but as a mythical hero. The image of Tilak as an uncompromising champion of swaraj, a reckless patriot hurling defiance at the mighty British raj, while the craven moderates lay low, does less justice to the subtlety, stamina and flexibility of a consummate politician who managed to survive the bitter hostility of the government for nearly forty years.”

About Vivekananda, academician Sabyasachi Bhattacharya has said, “Admittedly, there are indeed some passages in Vivekananda’ s writings where he speaks of the need to find the common bases of Hinduism and awaken the national consciousness among Hindus. But one or two such rare passages (usually occurring in addresses to meetings of a Hindu association or local community) are insignificant compared to the vast number of the contrary kind where he emphasizes the unity of all religions.” (Read the article here: Vivekananda)

On the 150^th anniversary of Vivekananda, I read a number of newspaper and magazine articles on him and remembered reading Tilak’s meeting with him. (Read an interesting book excerpt: Dharma for the State) 

The two met at Bombay’s Victoria Terminus (CST) in 1892 when Vivekananda was an unknown sanyasi on a trip across India, and on his way to Poona. Tilak invited him to stay at his place in Poona, and was impressed by his knowledge of the Bhagawat Gita, and the similarity of their views on the core essence of Krishna’s message. Tilak himself was a scholar and in his Shrimad Bhagwadgita Rahasya forcefully advocated that the philosophy of the Gita is not renunciation because Krishna narrated the Gita to Arjun to motivate him into action. Vivekananda’s views on practical Vedanta are also similar.

Tilak has written about his meetings with Vivekananda.

Here is a passage: “Two or three years thereafter Swami Vivekananda returned to India with world-wide fame owing to his grand success at the Parliament of Religions and also after that both in England and America. He received an address wherever he went and on every one of such occasions he made a thrilling reply. I happened to see his likeness in some of the newspapers, and from the similarity of features I thought that the Swami who had resided at my house must have been the same. I wrote to him accordingly inquiring if my inference was correct and requesting him to kindly pay a visit to Poona on his way to Calcutta. I received a fervent reply in which the Swami frankly admitted that he was the same Sannyasin and expressed his regret at not being able to visit Poona then. This letter is not available. It must have been destroyed along with many others, public and private, after the close of the Kesari Prosecution of 1897.” (Read the passage here: Tilak-Vivekananda meeting)

They met again (either in 1886 or 1901) during a session of the Indian National Congress in Calcutta.