The first sign of Ganeshotsav in our building is not the idol. It is a WhatsApp message from the cultural committee, usually a month before, proposing a meeting on Sunday at 11 to discuss the budget. By the time the idol arrives, there will have been four more meetings, a small argument about the decoration theme, and a spreadsheet of who is sponsoring which evening's prasad. It is, in other words, a festival that runs on the same machinery as everything else in a Mumbai housing society. That is part of why I love it.
The ten days
Ganeshotsav begins on Ganesh Chaturthi, in the month of Bhadrapada, usually falling in late August or September, and runs for ten days, ending on Anant Chaturdashi with the final immersions. Not everyone keeps the idol for all ten days. Many households bring Ganpati home for a day and a half, five days or seven, and immerse the idol at the end of that period. Public mandals generally keep theirs for the full ten.
The shape of each day is familiar to anyone who has lived through a few. There is an aarti in the morning and a louder, better-attended one in the evening, with cymbals, clapping and a group of children who know all the words and sing them slightly faster than everyone else. Modaks, the sweet dumplings associated with Ganesh, appear in quantities that defy medical advice. Families visit each other's homes to take darshan of their Ganpati, and the week becomes a tour of friends' living rooms.
Household, building and sarvajanik
There are three broad scales of celebration, and they feel very different.
The household Ganpati is the most intimate. A family installs a small idol at home, often a tradition going back generations, and invites relatives and friends. The atmosphere is warm, crowded and focused on food.
The building or society celebration sits in the middle. Residents pool money, install an idol in the lobby, compound or clubhouse, and run a programme of aartis and events for the members. This is where newcomers most often find their way in.
The sarvajanik, or public, mandals are the big ones. The public celebration of Ganeshotsav was popularised in the 1890s by Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak, partly as a way to bring people together at a time when the colonial authorities restricted public gatherings. Today the large mandals are community organisations in their own right, with elaborate pandals, huge idols, volunteer corps and, in some cases, substantial charitable work.
The most famous of all is Lalbaugcha Raja in Lalbaug, which draws crowds of devotees from across the country. There are typically two queues: one for those who want to touch the idol's feet, which can take many hours, sometimes most of a day, and a faster one for mukh darshan, a view of the idol's face from a distance. If you go, go knowing what you are signing up for, carry water, wear comfortable shoes, keep your phone and wallet secure, and follow the volunteers' instructions. The crowds are enormous and the organisation is impressive, but it is not an outing for the faint-hearted.
How a building mandal actually works
Our building's celebration is run by a small committee of volunteers, most of whom also have full-time jobs. Their work starts weeks before. They collect contributions from each flat, usually a suggested amount that people are free to exceed, and book the idol from a murtikar, often the same workshop year after year. They plan the decoration, arrange the priest for the installation, draw up a rota for the daily aartis and prasad, and organise events: a drawing competition for the children, a quiz, an evening of songs, and inevitably a tambola night that becomes more competitive than anyone expected.
The unglamorous parts matter just as much. Someone has to handle permissions if a pandal or amplification extends outside the building's own premises, clean up after each evening, and coordinate with the society's managing committee about security and common areas. Good mandals publish accounts at the end. The best ones I have seen treat it like a small, well-run event, with a clear budget and no pressure on anyone who prefers to contribute less or not at all.
Visarjan, noise and the environment
The immersion, visarjan, is the emotional climax. The idol is carried out with music and dancing, to cries of Ganpati Bappa Morya, and taken to the sea, a lake or an artificial pond. On Anant Chaturdashi the big public processions move slowly towards Girgaum Chowpatty, Juhu and other immersion points, and much of the city's traffic is diverted. Plan to stay home, or to be in the crowd; there is no in-between.
The festival also has an environmental cost, and Mumbai has been reckoning with it for years. Most large idols have traditionally been made of plaster of Paris, which does not dissolve readily in water and leaves residue in the sea and lakes, along with paints that may contain harmful chemicals. The alternative is shadu, a traditional clay, which breaks down far more easily. Rules on PoP idols have been the subject of guidelines and court proceedings for some time, and the position has shifted from year to year, so check the current rules issued by the state government and the BMC.
What has become routine is the use of artificial ponds. The BMC sets up many of them across the city each year for household and small idols, and a growing number of societies immerse in a tank within their own compound and use the dissolved clay afterwards in gardens. Our building switched to a shadu idol and an artificial tank a few years ago, after a committee meeting that was considerably calmer than I had feared.
Noise is the other perennial concern. Loudspeaker use is regulated, with time limits at night and some relaxations on specified festival days, and many societies have their own sensible rules about volume and hours. If you have elderly neighbours or small children in the building, a quiet word with the committee usually works better than a complaint.
How a newcomer can take part
If you are new to the building, or new to Mumbai, or simply not Hindu and not sure whether you are welcome, the short answer is that you almost certainly are. Ganeshotsav in a housing society is as much a social occasion as a religious one, and most committees are delighted to see new faces.
A few ways in:
- Contribute to the collection, at whatever level feels right, and turn up to at least one evening aarti.
- Offer to help. Committees are always short of hands for decoration, prasad distribution or clearing up, and doing a job is the quickest way to get to know people.
- Sponsor an evening's prasad, or bring something you have made. Nobody minds if it is not a modak.
- Bring the children. The competitions and games exist largely for them.
- Accept the invitations to neighbours' homes. You will eat far too much, and you will leave with neighbours you actually know.
Remove your shoes before approaching the idol, dress modestly, and follow the lead of those around you during the aarti. Nobody expects you to know the words.
What the festival is for
For most of the year, a Mumbai housing society is an institution for arguing about maintenance charges, parking and water tanks. For ten days it becomes something else: a group of people who live stacked on top of each other, standing together in the lobby singing, eating from the same plates and taking photographs of each other's children.
When the idol leaves on the last day, there is a genuine pang, even among those of us who spent the week grumbling about the dhol practice. Then the WhatsApp group goes quiet, the lobby is swept, and within a fortnight we are back to arguing about the water tank. But we argue a little more kindly, and that is not nothing.
