Ganesh Chaturthi

Ganesh Chaturthi celebrates Ganesha as the remover of obstacles, patron of wisdom and auspicious beginnings. Puranic traditions tell his birth in more than one way, but the best-known account says Parvati fashioned a boy and appointed him to guard her privacy. When Shiva returned and the boy, not knowing him, refused entry, a confrontation ended with the child's head being severed. Seeing Parvati's grief and anger, Shiva restored the child to life with the head of an elephant and recognised him as Ganesha, giving him an honoured place before other worship. The festival therefore remembers both Ganesha's birth and his role as the deity invoked at the start of important work. Families and communities install clay images, offer modak and durva grass, recite prayers and perform aarti. After the chosen number of days, the image is taken in procession for visarjan, symbolically returning the form to the elements.

Ganesh Chaturthi is valued for devotion, family tradition and the spiritual or seasonal meaning attached to the day.

A clay image is installed at home or in a public pandal and kept for a day, or three, or ten. Modak and laddu are offered. At the end the image is carried in procession and immersed, and the parting is said aloud as an invitation to return the following year.

Maharashtra keeps it largest, and the public pandal is a Tilak-era invention that made a household rite a civic one. Ten days there and in Gujarat; a day and a half in many homes. The south keeps Vinayaka Chaturthi more quietly, with kozhukattai. Immersion is increasingly in tanks rather than rivers, and clay images rather than plaster.