The elephant and Ganesha, the god who removes obstacles
Ganesha, the elephant-headed god: the myths of his birth, his symbols, the Mahabharata, the elephant Airavata and the Ganesh Chaturthi festival.
In India the elephant has for millennia been a symbol of strength, kingship and wisdom. It was the mount of kings, it appeared in temple processions and in armies, and its slow, steady gait suggested a power that has no need to hurry. The figure who more than any other made this animal sacred is Ganesha, the elephant-headed god, today among the most venerated deities of Hinduism.
How Ganesha got his elephant head
The Purāṇas preserve several stories about the birth of Ganesha. In the best-known version, told in the Shiva Purāṇa, the goddess Pārvatī shapes a son from the paste used for her bath and sets him to guard the door. When Shiva returns and the boy prevents him from entering, the angry god beheads him. To console Pārvatī, Shiva gives him the head of the first animal found, an elephant, and makes him leader of his followers.
Other texts offer different versions: in the Brahmavaivarta Purāṇa, for example, the child's head is destroyed by the gaze of the planet Śani. The variety of stories is typical of Indian mythology, where the same event may be told in many ways. The name Gaṇapati, «lord of the hosts», recalls precisely his role as leader of the gaṇas, the hosts in Shiva's service.
The lord of beginnings
Ganesha is called Vighneśvara, «lord of obstacles», because tradition credits him with the power to place and remove impediments. For this reason he is invoked at the start of rites, journeys, weddings, literary works and business ventures. His iconography is rich in detail: the large belly, a broken tusk, a dish of sweets called modaka and a small mouse as his mount.
The god is also the patron of letters. According to a very widespread tradition, though absent from the critical edition of the poem, it was Ganesha who wrote down the Mahābhārata at the dictation of the sage Vyāsa, using his own broken tusk as a stylus. The oldest images securely identifiable as Ganesha date to around the fourth or fifth century AD, and his cult later spread to Southeast Asia and Japan as well.
Divine elephants and Ganesh Chaturthi
The sacred elephant is not limited to Ganesha. Airāvata, the white elephant who serves as the mount of the god Indra, emerged according to myth from the churning of the ocean of milk, and eight cosmic elephants, the diggajas, support the cardinal points. In Buddhist tradition Queen Māyā dreamed of a white elephant entering her side before conceiving the future Buddha, a scene frequent in the reliefs of Bharhut and Sanchi.
The god's main festival is Ganesh Chaturthi, which falls between August and September. In 1893 in Pune the nationalist leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak promoted the transformation of the occasion from a domestic celebration into a public festival, with large statues displayed in pavilions and then immersed in the water. Even today, especially in Maharashtra, the festival draws immense crowds for about ten days.
Ganesha's success can perhaps be explained by his ability to unite opposites: a human body and an animal head, the strength of the elephant and the smallness of the mouse, a benevolent appearance and the power to block the way. In the image of the elephant god India expressed a simple and profound idea: every undertaking begins by recognising the obstacles that await it.