|
| |
| |
Lord Ganesha
|
 |
|
- Now
Parvati was in a terrible rage and the temper of the Mother of the Universe
is not lightly put aside. Vishnu, silver-tongued as befits a Trickster,
offered a compromise. As the boy existed he was too troublesome to be
revived. But if she accepted a changed form and a position of primacy
amongst the gods, well he could do something. The first living thing to the
north, direction of new beginnings, they came across was an elephant, so
they cut off that head and attached it to the boy's neck. The boy became the
leader of the ganas as befitted the only person who had ever conquered them,
and from that day on, his was the first name to be invoked before beginning
anything. To ensure that there would be no slip-ups, the gods made him
Vighneshwara, the Lord of Obstacles. If you prayed to him, the obstacles
would disappear. If you did not, well then he would place them in your path
till your memory was jogged. In this story not only is the oedipal conflict
taken to a logically gory end, the gradual merging of the fiercely
independent Yaksha deity with the mainstream Hindu gods is also apparent.
Indeed the oedipal angel has never been successfully sorted out by any of
the myths. In a strangled acknowledgement of the fact, some myths describe
him as an eternal celibate, resolved never to marry because no woman in the
world can ever match up to his mother. Which only makes the matter even more
complex and explicit by the way, but such understanding was hard to come by
in those innocent days. Elsewhere he is given two wives, Siddhi and Buddhi,
in deference to the Indian sentiment about marriage. Siddhi and Buddhi are
however, abstractions meaning the power of success and intelligence
respectively and not real wives as such.
Once
Ganesha was safely within the Hindu pantheon however, his popularity rose
steadily and very soon he was being described as the Supreme God. This is
the old Indian tendency to kathenotheism, the worship of one god
after another, one god at a time, with each god being worshipped, being
regarded as the Supreme God for that period. Once established, his
connections with the goddess were what the artisans first stressed, as
Ganesha is invariably depicted as a Guardian of the Matrikas, a sort of
collective mother goddesses, separate and distinct from the mainstream
Mahashakti or Mahadevi. Since the other guardian of the matrikas is almost
invariably Kubera, Lord of the Yakshas, it is obvious that we have here
another large-scale absorption of local religions into the larger
mainstream.This is especially true in Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and
Karnataka, which were ancient Yaksha country. One only has to look at the
sculptures there to realize this, (Ellora, Badami, and Vijayanagara) and
Ganapati as a god who is regularly worshipped instead of being only ritually
invoked, is strongest in Maharashtra and Karnataka.
- Many
puranas were written about Ganapati and his adventures were carefully based
on the exploits of Shiva and Vishnu. He too takes avatars and he too has a
dancing form like the famous Nataraja. Today the stories have dried up, but
the forms multiply. Ganapati is depicted as Krishna dancing on the serpent
Kaaliya, he is depicted as Shiva, as Durga, as Laxmi, and even as Sai Baba
of Shirdi. He is shown dancing, as a young sanyasi, as a baby, as a Shiva
devotee, as a great warrior. In fact only imagination limits the forms
Ganesha takes on today. Of course a lot of it is pure and simple kitsch and
is usually motivated by that strongest of all religious aspirations, the
worship of money.
Non Indian cultures have a great deal of trouble comprehending the casual
Hindu acceptance of an elephant headed god and wonder why it has to be made
so difficult. Well, actually all of the Ganesha iconography is symbolic and
none of it is any more difficult than hieroglyphics or the calligraphic
scripts of the world. Ganesha is not an elephant that is worshipped, he is a
god with an elephant head and the difference is vast. His mouse mount too is
actually a symbolic reference to his being the Lord of Obstacles, for the
mouse finds some way around all obstacles on its way to its goal.
Of
course there are also stories about it being a demon he conquered and is now
keeping under control for the benefit of the world, but one does not have to
take these things literally. Many devotees claim that the symbol for Aum
represents the elephant head and trunk of Ganesha, and the Tamil symbol for
Aum indeed does look very similar to a Ganapati head (see illustration). I
do not go into details about symbolism here because of space constraints and
because this sort of stuff is available anyway.
Ganapati is not only the God of Beginnings, he is the defacto God of
Learning and Wisdom, as befits his elephant head. The elephant lives long,
forgets nothing, is brave, loyal, kind, strong and gentle and literally
rolls boulders in your path aside - what could be better attributes for a
god? Ganapati is traditionally reputed to have taken down the Mahabharatha
at the dictation of its composer, the poet-saint Vyasa. He broke off one of
his tusks to write it with, in honor of the great material he was privileged
to set down. Being of an impish, teasing nature, he demanded that Vyasa's
dictation never cease or he would quit. Vyasa laid a counter condition that
Ganesha would not put down anything that he did not fully comprehend.
Whenever he saw that he was not going to be able to keep up with this
paragon of stenographers, he would compose some extremely complex verses
meaning many things simultaneously, Sanskrit being the perfect language for
such wordplay. The single-tusked one would pause to grasp these subtle
concepts and Vyasa got a breather. It is traditionally held that the Wise
One deliberately set Vyasa up so that he would write an enduring work of
wisdom, not a mere epic about the squabbles of members of Vyasa's family.
-
- It
is perhaps hard to realize that Ganapati is a still evolving god, he is
changing as the public perception of him changes and he fulfills
increasingly different needs amongst his devotees. Maharashtra has the
largest public festival surrounding his worship, and it seems to be an
integral and ancient part of the landscape. However it is just slightly over
a hundred years old and is an innovation in the method of worship, which was
typically restricted to individual households. This public worship was the
idea of a great political leader Tilak and was about the only legitimate
forum in which large numbers of people could gather without getting the
suspicions of the British Raj aroused. The Raj is over, but the tradition
remains, indeed it is well entrenched and a vital part of the spiritual
calendar. It is also true that perhaps only the malleable Ganapati, popular
amongst all classes and castes could be so used to unite an extremely
heterogeneous society. The annual Ganesha festival is now spreading outside
of Maharashtra as the popularity of Ganesha grows slowly and very very
surely. He is taking the Internet age in stride too. Websites offer you
online darshans of the pujas in major temples during this season. Ganesha is
going to be around for a long, long time.
-
|
|
