An historical annotation: Tilak needed a symbolical rallying point because at that point of history, in Western India, specifically the Bombay Presidency, there was a lot of insecurity and lack of self-belief among Indians, and a general tendency to toad-eat the British. Some violent reactions to this perceived surrender to the overlords took the form of attacks on plague inspectors or the lower rungs of the bureaucracy. Tilak's idea was to create a rallying point for the Hindu masses in general without giving the administration any reason to ban it as subversive, and so he seems to have decided on a seemingly defensible action, a religious festival with a difference. He converted a private festival into a public one, and put in some rules which ensured that it lasted for more than a day and that it had an end at that. Shiv has already pointed out that the Ganesh Puja seems to have been a post-Buddhist 'recreation' from the times of Hindu revivalism, around the 9th and 10th centuries AD. That accounts for the mishmash of Vedic and post-Buddhist ideas and concepts swirling around inside the actual ritual, but I can't help pointing out that most public Hindu worship is this kind of mishmash, precisely because most public Hindu worship is a mixture of Vedic and post-Buddhist revival ideas. Tilak and the Ganesh Puja again: he seems to have taken some of his ideas from the parallel development of the community Durga Puja in Bengal. The Durga Puja was essentially an upperclass festival, a 'house' festival, very expensive to do, therefore limited to the aristocracy, the tax-farming gentry in the countryside, and the comprador elite in the cities. It was seen as exclusive, and the Puja itself was inherited as a matter of birthright by the children of the original celebrant, strictly in order of their birth. So a celebrant with three (male) children would be succeeded by the three, each with the right to celebrate it every third year, and so on. (I found out this stuff when I found out that my uncles had the right every 180 something years!!!). This was quite obnoxious to the expanding and increasingly restless middle classes, who came out (I don't have any specifics on dates or names for this while I write on line and from memory) with the concept of the Barowari Puja - from Baro Yaari, twelve friends, getting together to pool expenses. All modern Bengali Durga Pujas are Barowari Pujas. There are still 'house' Pujas. An interesting sidelight - in the house puja, the lion is visibly male, in the community puja, the potter/ clay idol-maker does a kind of airbrushing in clay. There have been some community lions which are fully 'equipped', but these are considered to be aberrations. Back to Tilak - it's interesting that this and other guerrilla tactics were considered revolutionary up to a point of time, but he and his faction were called moderates and relegated to the background when Gandhi and his generation of activists came to the fore.
shiv sastry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: On Thursday 20 Sep 2007 2:23 pm, shiv sastry wrote: > As far as I know - this refers to the very loud and PUBLIC celebration in > every street corner, as opposed to the private, in house worship that has > gone on for much longer Corroboration of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bal_Gangadhar_Tilak In 1893, Lokmanya Tilak reshaped the annual Ganesh festival from private family celebrations into a grand public event. [3] He did so "to bridge the gap between the Brahmins and the non-Brahmins and find an appropiate context in which to build a new grassroots unity between them" in his nationalistic strivings against the British in Maharashtra.[4][5] Thus, Tilak chose Ganesha as a rallying point for Indian protest against British rule because of his wide appeal as "the god for Everyman".[6] [7] Tilak was the first to install large public images of Ganesha in pavillions, and he established the practice of submerging all the public images on the tenth day. shiv Indrajit Gupta 'Ramsharan', 396, TT Krishnamachari Road, Teynampet, Chennai 600 018. +914455511138 +919884375777 --------------------------------- Unlimited freedom, unlimited storage. Get it now
