About Town: Ganpati in Mumbai

THE POLITICS OF DEVOTION

In 1893, the British Raj criminalised political assemblies while leaving religious gatherings untouched. Lokmanya Tilak, astute in his reading of power, seized upon Ganesh Chaturthi as a political technology, transforming private veneration into sarvajanik (public) ritual. What appeared devotional was, in fact, subversive: an ingenious act of nationalism through religiosity.

From this manoeuvre, the festival mutated into a contested public sphere, its processions becoming theatres of both dissent and consensus. The idols themselves became palimpsests of political longing, adorned with nationalist iconography from Gandhi’s stoic resolve to Bose’s militant charisma and Nehru’s modernist vision. These appropriations expose how a religious festival could operate as a dynamic archive of political will, shaping, and shaped by, India’s struggle for self-definition.

The provocation, then, is this: Ganesh Chaturthi in Mumbai is not merely religion performed at scale but politics intermingling with faith. What is the underlying thought behind collective devotion in public space?

URBAN ENGAGEMENT

The monumental history of Lalbaug’s Ganeshotsav is by now canonical, yet Girgaum offers a counter-archive. Its chawls and bylanes preserve quieter, more fading memories of the festival. Joining a No Footprints walk through this neighbourhood, we found ourselves retracing the festival’s sedimented legacies, each stop revealing not simply continuity but a dialectic of survival and erasure.

At Poonawala Chawl, a century-old pandal marked its final year before the building succumbs to redevelopment. An epitaph to both collective memory and urban precarity. At Keshavi Naik Chawl, the centenary mandal, reputedly graced by Tilak in 1901, still functions as a living repository of the nationalist experiment. “Our yearly holiday is Ganesh Chaturthi,” a resident joked. The route curved past the hundred-year-old pandal at Navelkar Building, before pausing for modaks and then arriving at Girgaon cha Raja, a mandal distinguished by its size and its responsiveness to the present, staging references to recent events like Operation Sindoor.

PROVOCATIONS & PROTESTS

But as we navigated these illuminated streets, more than seventy years after independence, a disquieting question pressed forward: what, precisely, are we celebrating? A few kilometres away, the arterial roads were immobilised by Manoj Jarange Patil’s protests. Mumbai’s choreography of devotion coexists with fractures in its political body. The simultaneity was uncanny: celebration as identity, protest as obstruction. Both claiming the same streets, both halting the city. The effect was of a colossal automaton suddenly jolted into consciousness of its own machinery.

This is the paradox of Mumbai’s urban condition: suspended between its memory as a self-contained civic organism and its present as a state capital under ceaseless strain. Between devotion and dissent, spectacle and survival, the beautiful and the banal, the city reveals itself less as a site of harmony than as an unresolved negotiation with itself.