Ganesha: The privilege of imagination

In east and west Trinidad, the festival is just over 25 years old, these areas having adopted the tradition later than south Trinidad where the Penal/Debe area has been celebrating it for well over one hundred years. It began as a farmer’s festival according to sources at the Suchit Trace Mandir in Penal.

Suchit Trace and the Ramai Trace Mandirs are two of the earliest known sites for the festival.

It was a time of drought. The then Puzzle Island, (now the site of the Suchit Trace temple), was inhabited by a few East Indians who had moved away from plantations in the early 1900s and established a small community.

The Elephant-Headed god (Gajanananda) was propitiated for relief from the drought. As the remover of obstacles Ganesh is the first to be worshipped by Hindus at the beginning of any task. Sources could not confirm where the tradition of visarjan (immersion) of the clay image had come from. It had always been a practice in their community that they have carried on for over a century.

The image of Ganesh is perhaps one of the best representations of the Trinidadian Hindu, in fact, the Trinidadian herself. The combination of man, animal and God representative of this hybridization of an identity that bestows us with the privilege of imagination for this in-betweenness of the diaspora grants us unbounded creativity.

Richard Rampersad, a young, upcoming local artist for instance has several drawings of this divine figure. When asked why this preoccupation he ascribes it to his attraction towards the hybrid, perhaps the reason for his love of the image of the god.

Ganesh is the divine scribe, another aspect of the divinity that makes him an appropriate representation of our diasporic condition.

He is symbolic of our fluid identities, an identity that allows us to re-tell our stories, to re-invent narratives.

“The re-telling of literature, has always been a part of Hindu tradition,” Raviji, founder and former leader of the Hindu Prachar Kendra, says. And Ganesh takes the oral narrative of the sage Vyas and enshrines it in the written text which he himself notates. He is chosen by the sage because of his intelligence and writes on the condition that the sage does not stop his narrative.

Writing a text dictated in the ancient Sanskrit language also required knowledge of the intricate grammatical rules and rhythm of the language.

Given that the Mahabharata is one of the longest epic poems in the world, also would have required a scribe bestowed with the patience to sit through the oral transmission of what is a highly complex narrative and the intelligence to follow not only the main flow but that of the many other narratives within the text. One story surrounding the broken tusk of Ganesh is related to this writing. During the writing of the epic, his pen wears out. In order that the flow of the writing continued unbroken, he breaks off one of his tusks and uses it as a pen.

These stories are all symbolic material for an interpretation of the importance of this divinity to a society like ours, for the creation of the Caribbean diaspora is in itself an epic narrative, stories within stories, layered and still evolving.

There is always scope, for our island is new and we are yet to build further narratives. Here, founded on societies steeped in oral traditions we have the facility to rework these and adapt them for our own uses.

For most Hindus, Ganesh is the first deity to be worshipped before any undertaking. The eleven-day festival dedicated to this divinity has grown phenomenally but, apart from the joys of community and the inevitable personal pride some take in the size of the image on display, it is also prudent to remember the symbolism inherent in Ganesh.

Not only does he represent the power of the intelligence, but he is also the power of creativity, persistence and the patience to narrate ourselves. For us, perhaps he is an appropriate symbol of the privileges of diaspora. The Ganesh Festival ends on Tuesday.