Sarvajanik Ganeshotsav

I remember how last year crossing the flyover at byculla I had called Megha to wish her for her birthday. How odd that this year, on Ganeshotsav, it was my birthday! Megha and me must share some cosmic connection. Once on the other side of the railways we inquired as to the route of the LCR. A man briefed us, it always passes by here at around four thirty - five. The road was largely empty and on one side people were gathering and sitting on the road. A little further down we reached dagdi chawl. Again it felt like we had reached some sort of important node in the procession. There was Arun Gawli's pushpa varsha with a man perched on some bamboos managing it. Opposite it was a truck with an idol and procession waiting. There were some huge JBL speakers on a truck behind it pounding music into the afternoon. On the other side of the road the dagdi chawl idol had just begun its onward march. There was a free water stand near a busstop and a large group of people had just recently spilled out onto the road and were busy arranging themselves into a procession.

A little further down the road the excitement died out and the road returned to it's regular activity. As we reached the end of it, the excitement picked up again. There was a free water distribution stand and some loudspeakers entertaining the neighbourhood. People around seemed to be having some important discussion when a taxi drove up with a big yellow moduk perched on top of it. I could not for the world of me imagine where that moduk was going to go and once there what it was going to do. The men around me seemed to be engaged in an important discussion about its precisely the same thing. One man climbed onto the bonnet of the taxi and opened up a little flap. He proceeded to mix up all sorts of pink flowers into a cane tokri and started, handful by handful, putting it through the flap. Once ready, some men had already taken one of the ropes and attached it to the building on one side of the road. Some other men had gone upto another person's house in the opposite building they were throwing the rope up to him. All these basic arrangements having been done, they began to hoist the moduk into the air slowly. Now watch closely because there are three important movements involved in the hoisting of the moduk, the first two involve shortening the rope that holds both ends, resulting in the lifting of the moduk, the third involved a man standing on the road holding a rope that went through the peak of the moduk and held up the base. As the moduk was lifted, the base had to be lifted. The base was kept unfixed as a mechanical device to let the flowers drop when required. It was controlled by the rope on the street. Should the people hoisting the moduk, hoist too fast, the base would not keep up and the flowers would fall out. This unfortunately happened, giving me a good chance to understand the mechanism although i would not be waiting for the LCR. After a bif of shock and a lot of rearrangement, the hoisting rope was up to the higher floor and the flying moduk was succesfully tied up.

When standing to the side of the procession it seemed like the procession didn't move forward at all. The same people danced in front of us continually. There were many things happening in that place, on one side was a bhojan kind of stand that had already shut down as the LCR had already passed that point, right near it were the Political Party stands that faced the chowk along which the LCR was to pass. Oppossite it was Shroff building. They had,as always,created a huge platform at the third floor level where people had gathered and from where the pushpa varsha was administered. Hiding behind the party booths were some DJ's who came there simply to advertise themselves and directly in front of us was a volunteer perched on the control box of a street light strapped to the pole and to his camera. A little to our left was a huge boom truss on one end of which there was a weight and the other end of which there was a man with a movie camera. He kept moving up and down to ascertain the perfect position from which to shoot his film. There were some people standing on top of the bridge holding sacks of gulal and a truck passed behind them, probavly replenishing supplies. When another idol ambled up the road, to turn at the chowk, it took a u-turn in the oppossite direction to pause there paitiently for the LCR to pass through the chowk first. Somewhere there was a man with a microphone who kept announcing all sorts of things. Last year he had cockily announced that in his opinion the koli women were not dancing enough for all the moduks they has eaten. This year he yelled over Himesh Reshamiya to the DJs to stop the music, over and over again. Finally the music stopped but the noise didn't. The LCR didn't appear. The music started again. The man on the microphone didn't. While waiting, the procession didn't fail to keep us entertained. A young boy stepped up onto the shoulders of someone else and started dancing above the crowd. There were cheers for him across the crowd and not to be outdone, another boy of the same approximate size, wearing white covered in purple and blue colour and dark glasses, got onto the shoulders of someone else and started dancing with that much more excitement. The competition was getting intense when the first kid finally got off the others shoulders. Just when we dedicated our viewership to the second kid, an altogether different person (bigger), got up onto someones shoulders and the kid got onto his. They made their way to the party booth where someone bestowed onto them a fivehundred rupee note that he waved to crowd signalling vistory. The fight was over but the dancing continued.

Ganesh Visarjan cannot be described by just one post, unfortunately it cannot be experienced in just one day. I have spent two days, that is one last year and one this year, trailing Lalbaug cha raja and both were spectacularly different experiences. Last year I started much earlier and got myself a rather squashed spot outside the entrance toran of the street leading to the ganpati. As the ganpati came closer and closer to the pink and gold toran the crowd swelled up and before we knew it I was at the periphery of the swelling far from where I had had considered myself firmly entrenched. What is centric to this entire experience is that of ‘seeing’ the idol. What one would call ‘darshan’. I had not seen the idol before that point so the forst glimpse was anticipated but as soon as that was done I could not remember why I was here in the first place! Surely it was not to ‘see’ the idol. I am neither devout nor religious, I am not even sure if I believe in God, yet somehow that everyone around you is just waiting to see the idol, it makes you feel very shallow if you happen to be there to observe anything else. The most ideal position of course, I enviously thought, seems to be up on the flyover, where one can look down onto the whole procession. Last year was completely different. After the idol left the lane we found ourselves bang in the middle of the procession, well at the periphery of the middle of it atleast. There were young men with ropes guarding the women dancing and smashing and squishing the people outside of the two ropes. When they saw me there was a sudden change in their tone, I heard them scream, “ladies hain, ladies”, and before I even knew they were talking about me, hey presto I was inside the ropes all safe and sound with a foot of space on all sides. That’s when Ninad mentioned back from the crowded side of the border, “if you don’t dance, they will throw you out”

And dance I did. The women were thrilled to have some strangely dressed person with rather odd dancing steps in between them, I was the entertainment of the moment. Most of the younger women stood around me and wondered whether to giggle at me was rude, some tried to tell me that my back showed everytime I lifted my arms, and the others tried to tell them that that kind of thing is allowed in their culture. But it was an old and rather round woman who finally broke the ice. With a stern and rather vicious look she walked up to me and got onto her tip toes to dump a fistful of gulal on my head. Then, rather pleased with herself and my shocked face, she took my arms and proceeded to lead me in a tango. Around ten minutes of this dancing was incredibly tiring but somehow thye managed to do it in rounds, I still marvel at the idea that these women would dance all the way from Lalbaug to chowpatty, all across kumbharwada and do tanki, all day and all night long, to all sorts of different songs and dances that people chose to play for them, I still marvel at the possibility of that.

The flyover was meant for one thing only. To stand and watch and photograph. Or of course, to control the remote controlled helicopters that would fly overhead sprinkling rose water onto the ‘ganesh bhakts’.
This year we reached the procession too late to be afforded that luxury. Instead we wove ourselves through the crowds a good half an hour or forty five minutes before the arrival of the idol at the Shroff building pushpa varsha where we stood within the crowd, feeling it swell up around us at the anticipated moment of the rain of flowers arrived. I cannot begin to describe to you how incredibly difficult those moments were, when the idol arrived. There was a man in front of us with his two women and two young boys. Before the action began, the two boys practiced their routine. The man would squat and these boys would climb on to his shoulders from where they could see above the crowds. When finally the idol arrived, they all got into position but soon after the crowd decided to move in a swaying manner. Although I am not sure what happened to that family, another tiny middle aged woman needed some help to be dragged out of the flour mill. Chakki. That is the best word possible for this situation. Your body is doing these strange rotations while your feet are in the same place, and you never know which of those rotations will be strong enough to knock you off your feet in between the two stones. I found myself yelling at the people around me. “Stop, stop moving, people could die, are you crazy, have you any idea of what you are doing?”, Ninad on the other hand found a volunteer and used a far far more effective line on him, he told him angrily in marathi that it looked to him like the only reason he was wearing the volunteers cap was to get a better view of the procession. Apparently, insulting one about the misuse of their authority works very well to get things done.

So yes, both years had incredibly different experiences. Both experiences are so overwhelming that just describing them tires me. I feel I need a break before I can describe the crowds at opera house, the policemen at do tanki, the songs at chowpatty and the flying moduk. Yes, I will end this post with the promise of yet another account of the flying moduk.

It amazes me every year, how insanely large ganeshotsav is in Mumbai. It is one of those things that adds up in small mandals that together on the last day flood themselves out onto the street. If these many people came out of their homes to ‘chill’ on Saturday nights, things would be insane! The Lalbaug cha Raja ganpati is quite different from the others. It has an exceptionally large fan following.

On visarjan day most people who don’t have anything to do with the organisation and have just brought their families to watch the festival come to Lalbaug rather than anywhere else. Somehow the Lalbaug parade gets bigger and bigger till its bigness is bigger than anything else.

The murti itself is gorgeous. I was under great pressure when I went to visit it and sadly I misjudged the care and beauty with which it was made, although I never even got a glimpse of the golden feet. I don’t understand at all how the system of visarjan works. I know that volunteers for LCR run up ahead of the whole visarjan parade and arrange the coming of everyone, but what about other ganpatis? How do they plan their visarjan so as to not fight over who gets to go first?

Certain chowks are key to the whole festival. The chowk under the Lalbaug flyover is one of them. Shroff building on the corner there organises a pushp varsha. An elaborate chariot with four white horses was constructed to ride across the skies and shower the Lord with flowers. Unfortunately I shot that video in portrait!

We walked the route of LCR till we got very tired and the rest of this post attempts to document the city preparing for ganpati rather than the ganpatis themselves. The occasional idol would rumble by amongst a gaggle of bombs

and then the street would go back to silent anticipation, waiting for LCR. Since there was no way possible for us to work our way to the front of the parade and walk down sant guruji road, we walked to the back and down Dr. Ambedkar road instead and joined the route back again at byculla station. Walking down NM Joshi marg we encountered Arun Gawli’s dagdi chawl ganpati and his puspha varsha for LCR.



Everywhere we went, random people would organise themselves to put up a stall serving free water to Ganesh Bhakts and random visitors. Outside the station, just somewhere on the road, everywhere, people had stalls giving water. Sometimes they would organise a pushpa varsha, to shower flowers or garland ganpati. The shroff building one was cool because it could go back to the building and refill itself. Some of the others were much simpler mechanisms. Sometimes at a chowk people would organise music for the entire day and others would put up large garlands. The point is that no one really knew each other. Imagine organising a festival in which there was no one central brain / event manager. People randomly decided what they thought the festival needed and collected funds and organised it. And all these small organisations came together to interact with each other very successfully. They rarely even had each others phone numbers. Add to this the police, who organised themselves all over the city without consulting the mandals. My sister was part of the Malhar organisation last year and she is of the opinion that without a central management her festival would have failed, yet here is a festival, so much bigger and crazier, and it actually organises itself. An intuitive festival! Who would have thought?

The weirdest of them all was ofcourse the DJ who came and set up shop on his own and brought all of the latest himesh tracks and played them inbetween ganpatis.


So a little further down we found a moduk that did pushpa varsha on behalf of the Mazgaon Padam wadi.



A small snafu happened where some flowers got out of control, but it was fixed in time with no major issues. In the meanwhile another ganpati left us in an explosion of string bombs covered in gulal.

At the end of NM Joshi marg we encountered the Khatau Mills whose chawls had organised a piaoo, all of the piaoos across the city use the same glasses and the same water containers, I wonder who supplies them?

And then we found the flyover, closed for the day, in front of the byculla firestation. The kids looked like they were finally enjoying the vision Mumbai endeavours!!






At the other chowk whose name I don’t know, under the byculla flyover, we found the LCR generator van waiting for the ganpati. It was getting dark and it would light up the idol all night before it reached girgaum at 5 am.

After some more busy chowks

We found some garlands



And then we reached a point where many ganpatis erged together. Do tanki. That was when things started getting crazy again. Although each ganpati procession is not to big on its own if two or three start coming together the cumulative effects somehow seem exponential.



From then on, the path of LCR is crazy, it takes lots of tiny lanes inside kumbharwada, the exact route after Sant Guruji marg is : NM Joshi road, Byculla station, Claire road, Nagpada, Duncan Road, Do Tanki, Kumbhar wada, Sutar Galli, Madhav Baug, CP Tank, VP Road, Prarthna Samaj, Opera House and finally girgaum chowpatti.

It reaches there at 6 in the morning the next day. We did not have the strength to follow the whole route so we short cut it through lamington road and then to opera house. It was night by then and there were atleast 6 ganpatis on the road at the same time. There were people returning from Visarjan, everyone seemed to be having a ball. By then we were completely exhausted and I headed home. What was sad was that the revelry had just begun. Ganeshotsav happens in the night, when the lights go on and the shpws start and the people get off work. I was rather sad that both years I forgot that and went out early in the day, much before the party actually started.

Talk about a city that works hard and parties harder. Yesterday was one of the craziest Sundays I have seen in a long time. I borrowed my fathers car, and much to his apprehension, drove down to Pune to see the sarvajanik festival that we had only heard so much of. Pune has a very very different festival from Mumbai. The old city near shanivarwadi has within it 5 of the most historical ganpati pandals very close to each other. These ganpatis have been called the first, second, third, fourth and fifth ganpati in honour of Pune by Tilak. This adds a palpable sense of romance to the festival and ensures a sort of collaboration across the old city, of mandals, linked by markets. Having parked the car somewhere along the shaniwarwadi, home of the Peshwas, we walked to one of the largest (not physically) ganpati pandals in Pune, that of Dagdusheth Halwai. There was an entire temple constructed out of ply and paint to house the murti. We saw it loom up above us as we approached the chowk and people tended to converge into five lines wide walk up to the inside where the idol was. A path had been kept alongside for passer bys and the market edged along the buildings beyond them. People were leaving their shoes under thellas and trying to squeeze into the mass a little closer to the temple. Security guards in dark blue navigated their way through the crowds telling people not to take photographs and urging them to keep moving. The idol itself was gorgeous, I wish they had a picture I could buy or something, apparently in Pune, every year the fashion trends of the ganpati idols change slightly; this year all Ganpatis were wearing fetas, which are turban like things. The idol looked so beautiful with its feta, I couldn’t imagine it. There are no photos online of it also. Everyone only has last year’s idol’s photo. I don't know too much about this ganpati but i guess its all on dagdushethganpati.com.

Of the other ganpati idols, some were small and others were huge, but all of them were right there on the street, none of them were inside closed spaces, Ninad postulated that this was different in Mumbai because there they just wanted to get you close enough to the collection box! I think it is also because the spectacle in this case is the romance of hostory, whilst so many ganpati pandals in Mumbai having no historical or religious spectacularity, do crazy displays and decorations. We saw Guruji Talim, the third ganpati in honour of Pune, Tulsibaug the fourth, Tambdi Jogeshwari the second ganpati in honour of pune and Kesariwada, the fifth ganpati in honour of Pune. I can't seem to figure where i saw the kasba Ganpati. The entire area was some sort of huge market. The tulsi baug ganpati was almost in a thoroughfare, like one of those underwater tunnels through which you can see sting-rays and things. The whole area was advertised on, it was completely one sort of tunnel of advertisements.
Somewhere rather far away, in the office of the Tilak's Kesari, was Tilak's Ganpati. It shrank under the statue of Tilak and the largeness of the the courtyard. There was a strange palpable silence in that place and i wondered which of the two was being bowed to more. That was rather spooky.

The strangest was ofcourse the art of living building in bangalore. I will let the images speak for themselves!



We drove back to mumbai and i dropped Megha and Ninad at Sion, and headed down south. I knew it was a killer choice but the temptation of seeing Matunga and Lalbaug all lit up was too great for me to resist.
I can say now that i totally underestimated the scale of Lalbaug cha Raja. I inched closer and closer towards it in bumper to bumper traffic anticipating a flyover view of the whole street, and along the way i took many photos of lights and advertisements and political propaganda.
The closer i got, the slower the traffic moved. At some point, we were just standing still while i photographed the fireworls from a mandal somewhere in the distance. Then in an instant i i saw the lalbaug flyover, it was closed going south and all traffic had to be diverted. The entire closed arterial road had become a huge pedestrain plaza and i was covered with people skipping, shopping and laughing on their way to or from lalbaug cha raja. I was devastated to not get even a glimpse of what was happening there but as i milled down from lalbaug to Parel and all the way home, i thought, 'so many people! where do they go everyday? You see huge numbers on the trains and in busses going home going to work going god knows where, but where do they all go? There are not that many on marine drive! there are not that many at the forts and backyards and maidans and beachfronts as many as i saw out on the streets that day! Where do they go at night? back into their homes i guess. There is this constant will to 'themise' them and create public space for them and all those other things but here tonight there was no stopping the coup. Build all the roads you want, we will use them to party, and party all night, with our parents and children and friends and neighbours. We will party for 11 days. There was something surreal about seeing Pune and Mumbai like that. I live in a country with some of the longest working hours and a city with some of the longest travelling hours, and here at the end of it all, we still have the time to party even harder and longer!

Khetwadi was one of the crazier places I did the rounds of . Although Khetwadi itself is a rather large sort of place, this one road, an inner road where the ground floor houses printing presses and drawn carbon steel rods, has more ganeshotsav mandals than the imagination can account for. As I moved along the central road to my left and right shot off lanes called ‘khetwadi pehli galli’, ‘Khetwadi doosri galli’ and so on up to ‘Khetwadi barhvi galli’. I started from the 12th lane, that supposedly houses the most popular ganpati, but that is all hearsay, there is nothing official about it. From there onwards every lane had an SGM and almost all housing societies in between had SGMs and some more. The staggering density of ganpati pandals was such that between lane 13 and lane 7 I had already seen 12 ganpati mandals, skipping a couple of the smaller ones. Because of the high density of these festivities, I can imagine that in the night when the dancing and festivities begin, the entire area of the streets of khetwadi become one very very big party. The entire area will be lit up, one song on one street fading into another song on another street. I can imagine that it would be crazy. The road along which these things happen in Girgaum is too big, the ganpatis are too far inside for all of them to meld into one large festivity, but at Khetwadi I can imagine exactly that happening.

With all this extreme closeness of the pandals there is also an intense sense of competition between the mandals. Several of them had awards displayed up front and as I went deeper into the lanes, the decorations were more and more flashy and the social messages more and more forceful. This one pandal in between lane 10 and 9 was doing a trial run of their idea when I went there. They had chosen to theme their decoration around ‘maa’. There was a pink satin curtain in front of the idol on which strange shapes kept the viewer occupied as the voice over narrated the story. A spotlight highlighted images of famous ‘maas’ and contemporary situations as the narration referred to it and then at the climax of the message the curtain to rose to ask Ganpati to give us clarity and strength in fulfilling that endeavour. The other one with an elaborate narration simply kept their ganpati in the dark up until the end of the story. It had people whose heads moved and spoke and fluorescent lights to draw the audience to the speaking mannequins. They arranged for benches for the line outside and only admitted people inside at the beginning of the show. They also sold gate passes for direct entry, skipping the line completely. This was the first place I heard film music being played outside in the waiting and performance area, not inside near the idol.

On the second day of my sojourns I went to Girgaum, Khetwadi and Chikhalwadi. Girgaum is one long main road along which many of the smaller lanes shoot out somewhat perpendicularly, the ends of which have ganpatis decorated. The main street however has taken on a completely different nature. The street was transformed. Although I noticed the phenomenon in Lalbaug first, becase it is along an arterial road, the effect is slightly diluted. But to see, every ten metres, a large bamboo screen with adds and politicians was extremely unnerving. There are adds to see as you enter and adds on the opposite side of the road to see while you leave. The saddest part was that most adds were not even smart enough to do something exciting with the situation, they were the most default ‘fair and lovely skin’ adds that could be lying silently in the least used hard drive of the add company. Girgaum cha Raja was large, and although having seen GSB and LCR, largeness and goldness were not criteria to impress with. There is something to be said about each area having one large ganpati in every area.
girgaum cha raja, lalbaug cha raja, colaba cha raja and so on and so forth. i guess it makes the festival very everyday, not necessarily something you must take time out to do. So there is one big famous Ganesh in the neighbourhood, one for the building that you can hang out in or help organise, one for your house for personal devotion, one sponsored by the local party in power and one by the opposition. So the network of ganpatis is pretty widesh-deepish for lack of a better understanding of the situation. What I was thinking is that this whole huge festival happens across some amount of the city, children participate in drawing and sculpting competitions, cultural programs, plays, dances and singing takes place. These happen over many different parts of the city, motorable roads are made perdestrian, food stalls are set up around the events, the kind of food made changes on these days, souveniers are bought and sold and the press is all over the event, structurally, it is very much like the kalaghoda arts festival, albeit at a much much larger scale.

At two thirty five as we approached the Lalbaug cha Raja line we saw it increase metres in seconds. What seemed to us to snake down the lane and turn onto the street was incredibly long.

I made a gif to convey the shock with which we discovered the length of the queue. The yellow line is our assumption. The pink is how much we actually walked. The orange in an entire additional second line (whose origins are unknown to me) that we discovered much later on that was for people who wanted to go up onto the stage.




It took us three hours to get to see the idol. We amused ourselves with the rather odd way in which Gauri idols are sold and other random things.

At the end of it all, this idol really does not have the space that its contemporary, the GSB Seva Mandal has. It is not the ganpati of a community of jewelers and bankers and its new gold feet, hidden behind devotees, were not visible to us at all. The glimpse was but a couple of seconds, the photos undoubtedly will last longer, and that was it. Three hours of waiting, gone in a flash. The whole experience felt rather incomplete, rather like this post itself. Maybe when my wish comes true, the experience will feel more complete.

“The dance of the karaga in the city choreographs a pattern of urban space and sense of the body-in-the-urban that relies on a different concept of the city and the body. It breaks up the map of the city constructed by technology, planning models, caste, and neighborhood and converts it into a performative space at the same time that the body is also transformed through rituals, representations, and kinetic, oral, and somatic practices.[i] “

Two random things occurred to me as I was walking down the street from Matunga towards Lalbaug. The first is the palpable fetish for wrapping up things. This is probably exemplified by the sai baba ganpati display where all we saw were these two hands, large, forming a toran, we entered through them into a tunne with paintings of only eyes, hands, feet, legs in parts. They all seemed remotely familiar; they were zoomed in parts of sai baba. Then we were released from the tunnel into a display where professionals doing god’s work were labeled ‘doctor sai’, ‘engineer sai’, ‘scientist sai’. This was classic because no one seeing the display had any conception of what the space used to be. With the device of the tunnel, that little court or niche in the street was transformed into a bubble of something else.



Can one speak about wrapping up things without remembering the work of Christo?

And have Jean Claude and Christo yet conceived anything as outrageous as wrapping up an entire city?

The other random memory I had was of an art project I read about called ‘am (not) sterdam’. People were asked to bring their radios to a square in Amsterdam when a radio ballet was being broadcast. The ballet would suggest certain actions like lying down, sitting, that were not usually permitted in the street. Through the disconnected collective actions they might possibly do what was not permitted to the individual.

In Mumbai we understand the role of the body in the city very ritually, climbing to form pyramids regularly or wrapping up street corners and parading down the streets or flogging oneself in public and praying in the streets are all collective disruptions of the order of the planned city.