Ganesha

There is no origin story for Ganesha's elephant head. There are several, they are mutually exclusive, and the Puranic texts that carry them do not agree.

The best-known version has Parvati create a boy from the substance of her own body, or from clay and turmeric paste, and set him to guard her door while she bathes. Shiva returns, is refused entry by a child he has never seen, and beheads him. Parvati's grief is such that Shiva sends his attendants out with instructions to bring back the head of the first creature they find, and they return with an elephant's. In other tellings Shiva creates the boy directly. In others again he is born with the elephant head and no beheading occurs at all.

These are not variants of one story with details drifting. They disagree about who made him, whether he was ever beheaded, and whether the head was ever anything else. A tradition that had one account and forgot it would not produce this pattern. A tradition assembling explanations after the fact for an image it had inherited would.

Behind him stand the vinayakas. In the Yajurveda these are a group of four troublesome spirits who create obstacles and difficulties and who are easily propitiated, and Krishan traces Ganesha to the four vinayakas of the Manava Grhyasutra, calling him a non-Vedic god. The name Vinayaka carries forward as a standard name for Ganesha in the Puranas and in the Buddhist tantras. The shift is from spirits who cause obstacles and must be bought off to a single god who removes them, and it is not hard to see why the second is a more attractive proposition than the first.

Scholars working this material include Paul Courtright, Anita Thapan, A.K. Narain, M.K. Dhavalikar and Robert Brown, and they do not agree with one another either.

Ganesha is, on the datable evidence, a comparatively late arrival among the great Hindu gods, and the material record and the textual record disagree about how late.

Small terracotta figures with an elephant head, two arms and a rounded body survive from the first century of the common era at Ter, Pal, Verrapuram and Chandraketugarh. The earliest stone icons were carved at Mathura in Kushan times, in the second and third centuries. He emerges as a clearly recognisable deity with settled iconographic attributes in the fourth and fifth centuries, including sculptures from the Kabul region of Afghanistan and the Gardez Ganesha of the fifth century. On the textual side A.K. Narain states that there is no convincing evidence in ancient Brahmanic literature for the existence of this divinity prior to the fifth century.

That gap is worth stating rather than smoothing over. Objects showing an elephant-headed figure exist some four centuries before the literature acknowledges one. The likeliest reading is that a popular cult existed below the level of the texts that survive, and that the Sanskrit tradition admitted it late; but that is an inference, and the evidence is what it is.

The modern public festival has a documented political history. Ganesh Chaturthi was a household observance until the 1890s, when Bal Gangadhar Tilak promoted it in Maharashtra as a large public event, held in the street with processions and immersions. Colonial law restricted political assembly; it did not restrict religious festivals. The festival became a lawful way for large numbers of people to gather, organise and be addressed. It remains the largest religious event in Maharashtra, with immense clay images built for the ten days and then immersed, and the plaster and paint used in the twentieth century became a serious pollution problem that several state governments now regulate.