Growing up in the Bombay of the ’70s, I used to look forward to the Ganeshotsav. In our locality in Girgaum, whenever the festival arrived, signalling an end to the monsoonal torpor, my brothers and I used to hop into our Marathi neighbours’ Ambassador car along with their children. Their father used to drive us all down to the beach for the immersion. While the celebrations back then were more low-key and traditional — without the corporate fanfare that marks it today — it was still a great excuse for a day at the beach.
This year, across Mumbai, there were more than 11,500 Ganeshotsav mandals. While the Lalbaughcha Raja mandal is still the most popular, and one of the largest, mandals are now spread across the city and so are the idol-makers. Once the last bastion of all such celebrations, south Mumbai is now outdone by almost every other neighbourhood in the city during those two weeks, until the chants of ‘Ganpati bappa morya, pudchya varshi laukar ya (come soon next year)’ bring it all to a high-pitched end.
Even today, the festival is a quintessential Mumbai festival rather than a Hindu one, which somehow retains its cosmopolitan nature. A legacy, perhaps, of the vision of Lokmanya Tilak, who first brought the festival out of the privacy of homes in 1893 and onto the street, where community and egalitarianism found a new ideal.
Paul Noronha