Wednesday, August 30, 2006
The ganeshotsav festival began on the 27th of August, the day of anant chaturthi. That day was reserved for visiting the ganpati of my friends. Monday, August 28th I began to try my hand at a rudimentary documentation of SGMs in Mumbai. 
The plan was to work the city area by area until most of it was somehow or the other represented. I began with Matunga, renowned for the GSB Seva Mandal Ganpati. The entrance to the club grounds that host the ganpati is on a huge 4 lane road just of the eastern expressway. Small groups of people were gravitating towards the entrance. We saw some stalls set up by the side of the road; they were volunteers watching shoes while devotees went inside. The stalls were labelled A, B, C and so on up to Q or P, like the bays of the parking lot of some immense mall. The three volunteers in each stall were wearing t-shirts with alphabets that I assume were supposed to correspond with their stall alphabets, but didn’t. We left our shoes at stall F and headed for the entrance.
At the gate were some people giving instructions, hold your mobile phone in your hand, get ready for security check, Mr. Dinesh Pai had told me when I spoke to him that what with all the bombings and terrorist scares that this year particularly security had been tightened around the Ganesh mandal.
This meant that volunteers were required to have photo identity cards and devotees were required to be checked for suspicious items. It also, I discovered, meant that men dressed in militia colours would hold these black walky talky like devices out of whose side a hinged telescopic antenna protruded, pointing at the line of devotees. The antenna routinely rotated, frequently towards us, for no apparent reason. There were two lines of people, those that wanted to make a donation. They had to go fill in the money and get a ‘pauti’ (receipt) and form a queue. We stood in the ‘darshan’ line, for those who just wanted to look at ganpati and be blessed. I asked the volunteer if my camera was okay to take inside, he said ya, but no photos allowed.
The line was not extremely long, 15 minutes in and out. I had seen images of the idol on their promotion leaflet and had heard about its grandeur, yet as the line turned and I caught my first sight of the idol, I was stunned. It was not the largest or tallest idol I had seen but the throne made of silver, framing the idol was grandiloquent like nothing else I had seen. The function took place on the club grounds, a large canopy had been constructed over the whole ground, it was divided into two disproportionate parts, the idol was placed on a stage towards the back of the tent, to my far right was the larger of the two divisions where chairs were put out and people were sitting, to my immediate right in the smaller one, along the length of almost the entire tent were two or three havans with numerous priests. Directly in front of the havans was the idol, with a little space in between for devotees to do darshan and offer prasad. At twelve fifteen as per the schedule, the puja began and a couple of priests lifted a long tray to pour ghee into the fire as they offered prayers. I saw Mr. Pai and waved out to him, baffled he came up to me with a question in his eyes, I mentioned that we had spoken in his office, and with recognition he said, oh then why are you there, when you reach the front, come out. He sent a boy to let us into the main area so we could offer prayers at a little more leisure than those in the darshan line, after which we were left. To one side of the idol there was a woman weighing herself in prasad which would then be offered to ganpati and distributed to devotees with a coconut. I was given some prasad on my way out.
There was something nice about being recognised and given slightly special status. It made the whole affair seem a little less strict and rigid. For the scale at which the celebrations are organised, the people who organise it themselves are not that overbearing. Somehow this celebration is much larger than all the individuals that come together to make it happen. This ganpati specifically lacks that homemade feel. With all that gold and silver that covers and surrounds it, its feet and hands are gold, its thrown is silver, the mouse is silver, I wonder if slowly it will be made less and less of clay and more and more of silver and gold to be stripped just before immersion. Eyes of rubies, trunk of emeralds…then all that will be left to be immersed is probably the belly or the internal framework that will be put on the float and taken out into the sea.
Ganpati display areas are usually cuboidal structures that sit on the road or pavement with one face open sometimes.
The displays that choose to use light to make more splendid their display close all sides and have a small flap on the two sides of the forward face for in and out purposes.
In Matunga most of the displays we saw were on the pavement and open to see. On all sides of the front face there was a toran with the name of the mandal and the sponsors. There were ganpatis every thirty metres on the road from king circle to Matunga station.
Two were memorable. The first we encountered on the side of the road in a niche in between the flower sellers. The ganpati was decorated with purple orchids and colourful nylon roses and the street itself was replete with malas and flowers. It came across as the only really smart advertisement I have seen so far.
The other interesting one was the Arora Talkies karmachari varg ganesh mandal. Established as late as 1989 along the side king circle, this Ganesh mandal can be seen in conjunction with the Bharat Mata employee’s union SGM. These theatres are renowned as the last haunts of Mumbai’s mill workers. They have small ganpati mandals that are put up as far outside in the foyer as possible. I had spoken to one of the organisers of the Arora Talkies mandal and he told me that the owner had just passed away. There was talk of converting to a multiplex but nothing had been decided yet. He said that if they were hired again they would continue to have the ganpati festival. They would have to speak to the new inheritor. I was wondering how a ganpati display, that is so inclusive in its nature, would be housed in a multiplex that is so exclusive in its nature. Probably they would give more stylish prasad with the better seats!
