Ganesh Chaturthi

A blog about India would hardly be complete without a post about gods and festivals.  Religion is never far away - practically every car we travelled in had a god on the dashboard - usually Ganesha the elephant god, the remover of obstacles - highly appropriate in Indian traffic! ( In Christian Kerala this was often replaced by a rosary hanging from the rear-view mirror - the driver who took us from Kochi to Periyar clutched his from time to time in a way I did not find very reassuring!).

We were visiting in the time leading up to and during the festival of Ganesh Chaturthi.  This culminates in people parading images of Ganesha through the street and then immersing them in the nearest lake.  It used to be that the images were made of local clay (some still are clay) and so were effectively being returned to the earth from which they had been formed.  But these days many are made of Plaster of Paris, which has quite a serious environmental impact.  Bangalore has dealt with this by setting up a separate tank next to the lake and encouraging people to immerse their Ganesha images there instead.

When we were driving around in the first week of our visit we saw quite a few of the commercially produced Ganesha images, wrapped in plastic and waiting to be sold by the side of the road.

And on the last day of our visit, we saw them in action.  Earlier in the day my sister and I had seen a lorry with a group of young boys in the back, playing drums.  When my niece took us out to visit the site of the Ganesha immersions we encountered several similar lorries on the way, each bearing a Ganesha surrounded by boys and men, drumming, dancing and shouting.  Many of the temples along the way were lit up with fairy lights, and as we came to the lake there were enormous flashing images of Ganesha and other gods.

At the entrance to the lake area people stopped and unloaded their Ganeshas.  There were families and groups of co-workers decorating the images with garlands and lighting candles.

When they had finished their puja they carried the images ceremoniously into the lake area and handed them over the fence to the volunteers waiting to do the immersions.  As the Ganeshas were immersed three times and then launched into the water a shout would go up, and the volunteer would  bring back water to splash on the waiting devotees.

Around the edge of the area were the remains of last night's immersed Ganeshas, which had been trawled out of the lake again, and left to await disposal.  They were eerily grotesque, and added to the scene of devastation - the pool itself was filled with debris.  It was a strange contrast with the devotional nature of what was going on.