Ganesha

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.