The Clay and the Harvest

As the monsoon loosens its grip and the harvest comes into view, the year keeps two festivals that seem, at first, to have little to do with each other. One is a god made of river clay, in the cities of the west. One is a dead king coming home, on the coast of the far south. But look again and they are the same festival in two keys. Both are about a coming and a going. Both welcome a presence, honour it for a span of days, and then let it go.

The tradition is teaching the same lesson twice, in two languages.

The god of clay

On the fourth tithi of the bright fortnight of Bhadrapada, the elephant-headed god comes to stay.

Ganesha is the remover of obstacles, the lord of beginnings, the one invoked before any undertaking, the god whose name opens a venture and clears its road. Ganesh Chaturthi is his festival, and it has a particular and beautiful shape. In the days before, image-makers shape Ganesha from clay, the clay of the riverbank, and on the festival day the images are installed, in households and in great public pavilions raised in the streets, especially across Maharashtra where the festival reaches its height. For a span of days that runs in the largest celebrations to ten, the god is a guest. He is worshipped morning and evening, offered his beloved sweets, sung to, attended as a member of the household and the neighbourhood.

And then he is sent home. On the last day comes the visarjan, the immersion. The image is carried in procession, through crowds and colour and music, to a river, a tank, or the sea, and there the clay god is lowered into the water and let go. The form dissolves. The clay returns to the element it was taken from.

The tradition reads the immersion as the heart of the festival, not its mere ending. The god is welcomed knowing he will be released. The most loved image in the household is made to be dissolved. Ganesh Chaturthi holds together, in a single arc of days, the welcome and the farewell, the presence and the letting go, and it teaches the impermanence of every form even as it pours devotion into one. The presence is not the clay. The clay is returned to the water, and the presence is carried on.

A word on the festival’s history, kept honest. The worship of Ganesha and the household keeping of his day are old. But the grand public form, the towering communal pavilions, the processions through whole cities, the festival as a great civic gathering, was powerfully revived and reshaped by Bal Gangadhar Tilak in 1893, who saw in the shared festival a way to bring people together across the lines colonial rule depended on dividing. So the festival is ancient in its devotion and substantially modern in its public scale. The treatise gives both, and keeps them distinct.

The king who comes home

A thousand kilometres south, in Kerala, the same season keeps a festival that turns the same gesture inside out. Here the presence that comes and goes is not a god welcomed and released. It is a king, banished and allowed home once a year.

Onam is the great harvest festival of Kerala, kept in the Malayalam month of Chingam, across ten days that centre on the star Thiruvonam. It follows the solar Malayalam calendar rather than the lunar reckoning of most of the festivals in this treatise, which is why it sits a little apart. And it celebrates a story unlike any other in the festival year.

Mahabali, the tradition tells, was a demon-king, an asura, who was nonetheless so just, so generous, so loved by his people that his reign became a golden age, a time when, the songs say, all were equal and none deceived another. His goodness alarmed the gods, whose order depended on the asuras staying beneath them. So Vishnu came, in his fifth descent, as Vamana, a small brahmin boy, and asked the generous king for as much ground as he could cover in three steps. Mahabali, who never refused a request, granted it. The boy grew until he filled the cosmos. H. H. Wilson’s public-domain Vishnu Purana describes the strides that crossed the earth and the heavens. With two steps Vamana covered all the worlds, and for the third the king, having nothing left to give, offered his own head, and was pressed down into the underworld. But because his devotion and his generosity were perfect, he was granted one boon: to return, once each year, to see the people he had loved.

Onam is that homecoming. Kerala welcomes its banished king. Before the houses are laid the pookalam, intricate carpets of flower petals, fresh each day and growing larger as the festival climbs. The sadya is served, the grand vegetarian feast of many dishes on a banana leaf. Snake-boats race down the backwaters, long hulls of a hundred rowers. The whole land dresses and gathers to show the returning king that his people are well, that something of his golden age is kept alive in the welcome.

There is a real and respectful disagreement about how to read this story, and the treatise names it. The Vaishnava reading holds it as an act of grace: the proud king humbled and then blessed, Vamana’s third step a liberation rather than a defeat. Another reading, voiced by Malayali writers and scholars, hears in it the older note of a beloved native king brought down by the gods of a newer order, and keeps Onam above all as the festival of Mahabali himself, the good ruler the people will not stop welcoming home. Both readings live in Kerala. The treatise gives them both and ranks neither.

Two comings, two goings

Set the two festivals side by side and the symmetry is exact. In the west, a god is made, welcomed for ten days, and dissolved back into the river. In the south, a king is welcomed for ten days and then returns to the underworld he was sent to. Both festivals are built on a visit with an ending built in. Both pour love into a presence that everyone knows must leave. Both find their meaning in the farewell as much as the welcome.

This is the deep grammar of so much of the festival year. The lamp answers a darkness it cannot abolish. The colour is thrown over a world that time will still devour. The clay god is shaped to be released, the just king welcomed knowing he must go. The tradition does not pretend that what it loves will stay. It welcomes anyway, fully, on the appointed day, and then it lets go on time, and waits for the wheel to bring the presence round again next year.

The clay returns to the water. The king returns to the depths.

And the year climbs now to its highest festival of the Goddess, the nine nights when she takes the field.