Ganesh Chaturthi 2030

Ganesh Chaturthi celebrates the birth — by one tradition, the head-restoration — of Ganapati, the elder son of Shiva and Parvati, on the Shukla Chaturthi of Bhadrapada. The Shiva Purana and Skanda Purana tell the story.

Parvati, alone on Kailasa while Shiva was away in long ascesis, wished for a guardian who would be entirely her own — not, as Shiva's ganas were, prone to admit Shiva at any hour. She gathered the saffron-and-sandal paste (haridra-chandana) with which she anointed her own body, shaped it into a beautiful boy, and breathed life into him with her own breath. The boy was hers in every fibre — born of her substance, not Shiva's; this is why the Puranas insist he is Vinayaka, "the one not born of a male," and why he carries her colour, her gentleness, and her stubborn loyalty. She placed him at the doorway of her bath-chamber and told him to admit no one, not even Shiva himself.

Shiva, returning, found the unfamiliar boy barring the door. He told the boy to step aside; the boy refused. Shiva summoned his ganas to remove him; the ganas fell back, defeated, because the boy carried in his body the full force of Parvati's shakti. Shiva sent the trimurti themselves — Brahma, Vishnu, Indra, and the others — and they too were repulsed. The Skanda Purana describes a vast battle in which the boy, with the simple stick his mother had given him, held off the gods of every loka. At last Shiva himself drew the trishula and, in a single stroke at twilight, severed the boy's head.

Parvati emerged. Seeing her son dead, she withdrew her grace from creation; the worlds began to wither. The devas pleaded with her; she replied that the worlds could return only when her son returned. Shiva, now seeing what he had done, sent his ganas with the instruction: fetch the head of the first living being you encounter facing north — for the north-facing being would already be turned, the tradition says, toward the path of moksha. The ganas came upon an elephant, the elephant gave its head, and Shiva placed it upon the boy. When the boy stood up, Shiva embraced him as his own son and declared him Ganapati — leader of the ganas — and Vighnaharta — remover of obstacles. He further blessed him that henceforth no auspicious undertaking in the three worlds would begin without the worship of Ganapati first.

The ten-day festival, popularised by Lokmanya Tilak in 1893 to bring scattered Marathi households into one public observance, follows the story precisely. The clay image — for clay is the substance of Parvati's shaping — is installed on the Chaturthi; daily puja for one and a half, three, five, seven, or ten days re-enacts the time Parvati guarded her son. Modak is offered because the Mudgala Purana tells of Ganapati's love for the sweet; durva grass is offered because, in one tradition, durva is the only plant that returned to life after the great battle of the gods. On the final day the image is carried in procession to a river or sea and immersed: Ganapati returns to the formless water from which Parvati's shakti drew him, and the visarjan teaches that the form we worship is finally to be released back into what shaped it. "Ganpati bappa morya, pudchya varshi lavkar ya" — "Lord Ganpati, come back soon next year" — names the whole shape of the festival.