Big belly god

A time when being playful with god was seen as affection, not disrespect.

I miss Gannu’s big belly.

In mythic terms, Ganpati’s big belly signifies abundance and the capacity to digest both, the good and the bad. It also made Ganpati feel touchable, cheerful, playful, easy-going, almost Punjabi. As if he could do both, write the Mahabharat and share memes on DM. Living in Bambai I found that during Ganpati, my atheist and irreligious friends too brought modaks to office because we all know festivals are a celebration of fun and sharing as much as anything else.

In recent years, Ganpati’s big belly became a six-pack for a while. This was in sync with the prevailing social and political climate—aggressive masculinity, aggressive capitalism, supremacist politics interwoven with religion. Symbols morph with the themes of the times.

This year, I have not noticed those six-pack Ganpatis. Many murtis have tended towards being lean, or at least without much tummy. As if they are in a resting phase, hopefully waiting to grow back that tummy which accommodates many ideas of being, a capaciousness for pleasure and community in an approving god, not an authoritarian one.

I am not religious and I am also uncomfortable that festivals nowadays sometimes become like GST—requiring compliance with political identities instead of being a multicolour carnival of community life. Still, there remains something generative in the whimsical gusto of preparation and participation, and in being involved from the sidelines, without imposing only one meaning on the festivities as many of us tend to do. I admit I still feel a bit chuffed that one year our local Ganpati pandal won a prize for best pandal in Bombay. The theme was Parliament (the old circular building) and Ganpati was placed in the Speaker’s chair, invoking Somnath Chatterjee, a man committed to the non-partisan quality of the Speaker’s post he occupied, over party lines. A time when being playful with god was seen as affection, not disrespect.

This year, an unusual Ganpati has gone viral. It is a sari-clad Ganpati, at 3rd Cross lane in Khetwadi.  According to the artisans this is a feminine avatar of Ganpati. “The reason why he assumed a female form is because it is believed that a woman’s rage knows no boundaries,” said one committee member. This feminine version of Ganesh is also sometimes also seen as being a part of the sixty-four yoginis and found in Jain and Buddhist traditions. Even as there is an urge to unify and homogenise the meanings of religion at the centre of a society, people disrupt and queer these dominant narratives through their desires for different meanings, whether excavated or invented. They retain a sense of multiplicity, accommodation and participation, turning the divine into a metaphor for themselves, not only for judges and politicians.

In the lanes around Malad station, I chanced on another unusual Ganpati. It was a Ganesh with many overlapping heads and arms, like a digital puzzle, an Escher drawing, or an image from an old movie song where a prismatic filter, splits one figure into multiple images.  It was a visarjan day. Music blared everywhere. Religious songs were insterspersed with Lagelu Jab Lipishtick and yielded way to Bella Ciao dhol-tasha version. Sounds and images remixing and churning and synthesising something. Maybe a rambunctiously diverse India, the kind you need a glorious big belly to hold. Pudhchya varshi.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com

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