Idol immersion fervour in Maharashtra

By Mahesh Vijapurkar

MUMBAI, SEPT. 1. Continuing with the tradition of public festivities connected with Ganesh worship, all Maharashtra was awash with the fervour of immersion of the deity after nine days of prayers: the seafronts, rivers, lakes and ponds were the destinations for revellers.

This year, as is every year since 1893 in Pune where Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak started it as a cover for public gathering to further the political cause towards freedom and year later, its advent in Mumbai, the public celebrations have only become more noisy, more glitzy drawing young and old alike. Nothing takes precedence over the festivities.

Streets were clogged with processions, vehicular traffic giving way to the trucks carrying gigantic idols towards the immersion spots, people dancing ahead and behind the idols being ferried and the air dinning with the sound of huge drums rhythmically beating.

This is a replay of what happened a day prior to and on the Ganesh Chaturthi when the idols were brought in for worship.

The purpose of discourse for which the Lokamanya started the public worship, however, seems to have been lost.

It is the cacophony of music, save in some more traditional pockets, that rules the roost these days where vulgarism is taken in the urbane stride and where even the underworld sets up huge pandals with equally rich and expensive decorations. One tried to beat the other but some traditional pockets resist the trend.

One was in Girgaon, in Keshavji Naik Chawl, where a year after the Lokamanya's move in Pune, the celebrations started and for full nine days, people sang songs with political message which the British-run police assumed were religious hymns sung with a rare verve.

Their idol was two and a half feet tall that year and continues to be so even now. Tilak himself visited it and one such trip's centenary was celebrated this year.

As crowds surged to the water bodies to immerse their gigantic idols, some needing big mechanical cranes to hoist them towards the water from the trucks, they began to think of the next year's celebrations. People admit that the plans start today for that.

It is only the idol makers, as in Pen town, about 100 kms from here, who do their accounting now and take a brief respite before the new ones, according to demands of the buyers, fashion their offerings.

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