It’s Ganesh Chaturthi tomorrow and millions will celebrate this most endearing and helpful god on his mouse Mooshaka, also called Krauncha. I don’t know if children still have to follow the drill I followed as a child. Those days, we were not allowed to sit at home in the evenings. We had to go out and play with other children.
After vigorously running about and playing games, we trooped home when it began to grow dark. We had to wash our feet, hands and face as soon as we came in. We then went straight to the puja room where the evening lamp had been lit. After kowtowing to the gods, we recited a few short prayers. The first three were to Ganesha and then we’d say the Yakundendu to Saraswati. After that, we had to finish our homework before dinner. We were then free to read story books or play a board game, and so to bed.
We were told that Ganesha is a special friend of children and we could remember him whenever we felt we had a problem. So, our relationship with him began early, right from the time we learnt to lisp our prayers as very small children. A feeling of emotional security developed over the years, intensified by the beautiful glow of the evening lamp, and in our case, a Kamakshi deepam.
It was reinforced and multiplied many times over by the fact that Ganesha shrines were everywhere; his was the first shrine we saw when taken to visit a temple. Any new project, even our small childish ones, had to begin with a prayer to Ganesha to make it successful. Meanwhile, a charming custom in the North is to say ‘Jai Ganesh karein’, which means ‘Let’s salute Ganesha’, when it’s time to eat dinner, ‘inaugurate’ a new gadget or start the car for a road trip.
We discovered in later years that Ganesha was also the patron god of writers, scientists, travellers and traders, and that he had personally written the Mahabharata for Vyasa Rishi apart from winning the ‘fruit of wisdom’ for himself by going thrice around his parents, who were the world to him. Such stories subtly taught us about the respect due to parents. When we experienced life’s hard knocks as we grew up, Ganesha was an instinctive inner refuge of solace and encouragement.
Perhaps the most endearing thing about Ganesha is his easy accessibility. He does not ask for grand temples or rituals. He is there for you under a tree, in a simple roadside shrine and on your desk. If you can’t offer him his favourite sweet, modak, on Ganesh Chaturthi, he doesn’t seem to mind in the least. He wants you to taste it and be happy in his name.
A saintly figure who was particularly attached to Ganesha is Avvaiyar, the ‘Tamizh Taai’ or ‘Tamil Mother’. She is better known perhaps for her encounters with Kartikeya but her love for Ganesha was very deep. She is beloved in popular imagination as a feisty, intelligent old lady who wandered around the country speaking words of wisdom and frequently scolding the populace for its own good.
Nobody could resist her moral authority, her uncannily apt sayings, still taught to children, and her utter conviction. She is said to have made the fiercest kings with the biggest moustaches quake—Chola, Chera and Pandya alike.It is now suggested that Avvai is a conflation of three women poets who lived centuries apart in ancient India. Her most famous work is the Vinayaka Agaval, a 72-line poem in blank verse lauding Lord Ganesha.
It is said to have been written in the 10th century, but enjoyed a great revival in the 20th century and is widely taught even today, with many recitations on YouTube.In it, she worships Ganesha as her earthly and spiritual saviour. She says fervently, “You rose up like a protective mother and severed the illusion of earthly bonds.” Ganesha is said to have sent her to Kailash at the end.
Reflecting Ganesha’s kindness, Avvai says there are but two types of people, high and low. “Ittaar periyaar, Idaataar izhikulathaar,” she says, which translates to: “The generous are the high while the miserly are the low.” She is also said to have made an early feminist remark: “There are only two castes—men and women.”
She was greatly attached to Ganesha even as a toddler. She prayed to him with a patience and dedication unusual in a little child. When she grew older, she went every day to a Ganesha shrine in a grove nearby to sing to him and offer coconuts, bananas, honey, milk and flowers, which were said to be pleasing to him.
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Avvai grew up to be very beautiful. Her adoptive parents insisted that she get married, which she vehemently opposed. She was a fastidious girl of a deeply devotional bent of mind and shrank from the intimacies and problems of being a housewife. She tried to reason with her parents that celibacy, too, was an honourable choice and that the right to say no was as valid as the right to say yes.
But her parents would not hear of it and arranged her marriage. On the wedding day, a desperate Avvai was dressed as a bride. When everyone went outside to receive the groom, Avvai bolted through the back door. She ran to the Ganesha in the grove and pleaded tearfully with him to turn her into an old woman to escape being married.
When the wedding party arrived in pursuit of Avvai at the grove, they were shocked to see her transformed, by her god’s grace, into an old woman. She thanked her parents for their love and care, apologised for disappointing them and walked away for good, a free person.Be it with an Avvai long ago or in our own little lives with their joys and trials, Ganesha’s benign presence still seems to be very much with us.
Renuka Narayanan