Much of peninsular India is in the middle of a 11-day celebration of the “elephant God”, Lord Ganesh. Whilst the Lord has been worshipped for time immemorial, the festival in its current form involving public pandals and processions is a more recent phenomenon. Many of us have been under the impression that this emerged during India’s freedom struggle to circumvent the British ban on public gatherings, often attributed to the famous freedom fighter Bal Gangadhar Tilak. This article refutes that. The author is Abhinav Chandrachud, an advocate at the Bombay High Court, most recently in the news for defending the podcaster Ranveer Allahbadia and more famously the son of India’s recently retired and notable Chief Justice DY Chandrachud and grandson of another Chief Justic YV Chandrachud. The author argues that whilst the connection to Tilak is right, the real reason is more communal and driven by the British’s divide and rule policy.
Chandrachud says. “…for years past, it was customary for Hindus to participate in the processions that were taken out during Moharram called tabut (a word that literally means “coffin”)… the tabut festival involved musical processions, especially using a large number of drums. On the last day of the festival, the tabuts were taken to the seaside or bank of a river and immersed.”
This however stopped in 1894 after a communal riot that was a result of a divisive circular by Governor Harris (a former captain of the England cricket team, also behind Harris Shield – the prestigious inter-school cricket tournament in Mumbai).
“…after the palkhi episode, popular regional-language newspapers in the Bombay Presidency like Kalpataru, Mumbai Vaibhav, Indu Prakash, Deenbandhu, and Subodh Patrika, advised their readers, mostly Hindus, not to make tabuts or take part in the Moharram festival that year. Handbills were pasted on temple walls containing this message. The Poona Vaibhav went a step further. It told its readers that if Hindus wished to “have similar rejoicings”, they could start their own “procession in honour of one of their own gods on a suitable occasion”.
What happened next was interesting. Newspapers began reporting that an old Hindu festival, which was hitherto mostly observed privately, was going to be celebrated in Poona on a grand scale that year. On July 22, 1894, the Vyapari reported that preparations were on to celebrate the Ganpati festival with “more than the usual éclat”. “Chairs of state for idols are being made and splendidly fitted up in the town like the tabuts,” wrote the Poona Vaibhav the following month, “and bands of persons are seen in the streets melodiously singing songs in glorification of Ganpati and Shankar”.
In other words, the Ganesh Chaturthi festival that we now know of today had its origins in 1894 in Poona, as a Hindu substitute for Moharram. This was not lost on contemporary observers. In October 1894, The Mahratta explained the phenomenon that was taking place. The two sadhu poets, Tukaram and Dnyandev, were the “great favourites” of the lower classes, who considered them to be deities more beloved than the puranic Gods. When the Tukaram palkhi was seen to have been insulted by Muslims in Poona, the lower classes decided to abstain from the Moharram festival. “But their love to give themselves up to song and dance and to buffoonery for a certain number of days during every year remained ungratified,” said The Mahratta. “They therefore started the Ganpati festival.” “The festival was not a new one,” wrote The Mahratta, and had been “observed from time immemorial”. However, it was “modified…so as to resemble the Moharram”.”
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