A centuries-old tradition has found new life in Halton’s Hindu-Canadian community.
This week, the multi-day festival of Ganesha Chaturthi comes to a close. An extended network of adherents from Milton, Burlington and Oakville marked the occasion by making little statues of Ganesh as part of the holiday.
Out of a garage and backyard in Milton and Oakville, hundreds of volunteers gathered to make representations of their deity out of nothing more than potters’ clay and a mould. Once finished, the little idols are sent to families across the GTA -- at no charge.
Believers spend the festival praying to the representations of Ganesha. Once finished, the ritual of Visarjan – meaning ‘immersion’ in Sanskrit – is performed when the statue is dissolved in water. Some do it in natural bodies of water, others with a bucket and ceremonially pour it into their backyards.
All told, around 1,600 such statues were made and distributed by this network of local devotees.
“We had people working until two (in the morning),” said Neha Pandey, a Burlington resident who came up with the idea. “It was commendable to see all that coming together. When I started this drive in Canada, I never thought it would go so beyond.”
The tradition of making the clay statues is new to the region, but not globally. No one truly knows how old Ganesha Chaturthi is as a festival and there is much debate about its origins. The festival is about the creation of Ganesha, who was made by his mother Parvati out of turmeric powder.
It's said that the holiday originated in people’s homes and entered the public realm in the 1600s, when King Shivaji Bhosale I sponsored the observance. It became part of the Indian Freedom Movement against British rule in the 1890s.
The practice of immersing clay statues goes back hundreds, if not thousands, of years. But when Neha Pandey and her fellow immigrants tried to recreate the tradition in the west, they were at a loss.
“We tried doing this sort of thing a few years back when we were in the US. We went to the stores, we bought idols and we were assured by the shopkeepers that they were made of clay. But when we brought them home, we realized they were plaster of Paris,” Pandey’s husband, Hari Rishi Bahadur, said.
This was a problem as the material is not environmentally friendly. The family much preferred the material of clay -- as is the tradition in their home country of India -- which degrades easily and mixes with soil naturally, creating what they call ‘green Ganeshas’.
“My kids go and preach [environmentalism] in the school. They have more ecological sense than they had before it because they have seen how parents have this in the house,” Pandey said, in echoing her husband’s remarks.
Miltonian Pavan Kumar Basani and Oakville's Ajai Rana lent their properties for the communal effort. To them, the coming together of the community was equally as important as the religious aspect of the celebration.
“We were so inspired when people started to come. [They were saying] ‘we want to come. We want to join.’ Last year, we started with a limited group. When the people got involved, they asked ‘please involve me next year,’” said Kumar Basani.
“There were a lot of teenagers who never met each other and they made friends. They talked and in the process people get unified. Otherwise, people are busy in their lives paying the bills and doing their jobs,” added Rana.