top of page

By:

Rajendra Pandharpure

15 April 2025 at 7:55:54 pm

The BJP’s Ganesha Gambit

Pune’s Ganeshotsav has become an enormous civic and political stage, and the ruling party has proved adept at occupying it. Pune: The city’s Ganeshotsav is entering its final phase, but the festival has already demonstrated something beyond its extraordinary crowds and familiar spectacle: the extent to which it has become a political stage. This year, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has left a particularly visible imprint on the festivities, using an event that reaches deep into the city’s...

The BJP’s Ganesha Gambit

Pune’s Ganeshotsav has become an enormous civic and political stage, and the ruling party has proved adept at occupying it. Pune: The city’s Ganeshotsav is entering its final phase, but the festival has already demonstrated something beyond its extraordinary crowds and familiar spectacle: the extent to which it has become a political stage. This year, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has left a particularly visible imprint on the festivities, using an event that reaches deep into the city’s neighbourhoods as an opportunity for public outreach. The political appropriation of the festival has not, however, been without a counter-current. Demands were raised for curbs on noise pollution, loudspeakers and the volume of dhol-tasha performances. The argument was not against Ganeshotsav itself, but for moderation - notably, a complete ban on DJ music and limits on the number of dhol and tasha instruments used by performing troupes. Familiar Troubles The festival’s reality has been rather different. Major roads have been occupied by mandaps. Processions celebrating the arrival of Lord Ganesha have unfolded amid punishing noise. DJ music, while subject to restrictions, has continued. Traffic congestion has become a familiar feature of the festival, with the movement of political leaders adding another layer to the city’s already strained roads. The Peth areas have remained crowded deep into the night. The Shrimant Dagdusheth Halwai Ganpati temple has drawn enormous crowds for darshan from the opening day. From the old city to housing societies and neighbourhood mandals, Ganeshotsav touches virtually every part of Pune. For a political party seeking a direct connection with citizens, few occasions offer such a ready-made network of people, institutions and local influencers. The BJP enters this festival with an unusually formidable organisational base. It has two MPs, seven MLAs and more than 100 corporators in Pune. Murlidhar Mohol, one of the city’s MPs, is a Union Minister of State. Chandrakant Patil is a Cabinet minister in the Maharashtra government, while Madhuri Misal is a Minister of State. The party’s presence also extends into the festival’s organisational architecture. Its influence is visible across numerous mandals, large and small. BJP MLA Hemant Rasane is General Secretary of the Shrimant Dagdusheth Halwai Sarvajanik Ganpati Trust. Kunal Tilak, a member of Lokmanya Tilak’s family, is a BJP corporator. The political and cultural histories of Pune therefore intersect in ways that are difficult to ignore. The BJP’s senior leadership has also made the most of the occasion. National President Nitin Nabin visited Pune to seek Lord Ganesha’s blessings, while Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis visited the city before and during the festival. Such visits are about more than religious observance. In a festival watched by millions and embedded in the city’s social life, political visibility comes almost automatically. There is also talk in Pune that the BJP provided substantial financial support to Dhol-Lezim troupes and their organisers, with claims that some major mandals received financial backing as well. These claims would require independent verification, but the perception itself points to the depth of the political contest around Ganeshotsav. BJP workers, according to local observers, have also sought to make their presence more conspicuous than that of festivities organised by housing societies. Useful Expedient The festival arrives at a politically useful moment for the BJP. The party has faced disquiet on several fronts. Young people have been agitated over the paper-leak controversy. Broader public dissatisfaction has been voiced over inflation and unemployment, while government policies relating to ethanol and charges associated with UPI transactions have also generated criticism. While a political party can defend a policy in a press conference and advertise its achievements, during Ganeshotsav, its workers can be physically present in neighbourhoods, among processions, mandals, cultural groups and devotees. Politics thus becomes less about argument and more about visibility. That is the BJP’s advantage in Pune. Ganeshotsav, after all, is not simply a sequence of religious rituals. It is an elaborate civic network involving local organisers, volunteers, cultural groups, businesses, residents and political representatives. Whoever has influence over that network acquires a powerful channel of communication with the city. The BJP appears to understand this particularly well. Its strength in Pune’s electoral politics has been reinforced by a presence that extends beyond elections and into the institutions and social spaces that organise public life. The irony is that the very scale of the festival that makes it politically attractive also magnifies the civic costs. The political value of Ganeshotsav and the civic burden it creates are therefore two sides of the same phenomenon. For Pune, the larger question is not whether politics has entered Ganeshotsav. It has done so for decades. The more consequential question is whether the festival’s extraordinary social capital will remain primarily a vehicle for political outreach or whether the same influence can be used to reconcile celebration with the ordinary civic needs of the city. For the moment, the BJP seems to have understood the first proposition better than most.

Why We Really Watch Screen Adaptations of Ancient Epics

Writer: Sreejit Datta
Sreejit Datta
Jul 28
6 min read
A still from Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.
A still from Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.

If you have read epic poetry from ancient Greece or India, whether in translation or in the original, you’d know that the heroes in these great epic poems have their vulnerabilities. I’m not talking about physical vulnerabilities that ultimately prove fatal for them: Achilles’ heel or Duryodhana’s thighs, for example. No, but I point to the heroes’ vulnerabilities and weaknesses, understood within broader psychological, behavioural, emotional, and social contexts, arising primarily from their many attachments as human beings. Also, by ‘hero’, I mean that which is commonly understood: A brave, charismatic leader of men, the first and foremost among many; followed, respected, even feared, owing to their strength, courage, skill, and wisdom.


Bleeding Heroes

We find Lord Rama, the hero of Valmiki’s Ramayana, crying inconsolably when he discovers that his beloved wife Sita has been abducted in the forest in his absence. We see Odysseus, the hero of Homer’s Odyssey, quite unable to hold back tears at the mention of events of the Trojan War in a bard’s song during his stop in Phaeacia. The British-American filmmaker Christopher Nolan, in his latest offering based on Homer’s Odyssey, emphasises this particular aspect of the ancient Greek epic. Nolan interprets Odysseus in a way that leaves us with an impression of the legendary Achaean hero as a star-crossed, struggling, almost modern man; albeit an important one who once held a powerful position – perhaps the inner life of a significant modern-day politician or a Fortune 500 CEO.


Tossed about by the elements, Nolan’s Odysseus jostles with his fate, fighting temptations within himself to regain the position he has lost. The choice of Matt Damon to portray Odysseus’s character seems particularly deliberate in this light, because Damon has the characteristically glum and introverted modern countenance to pull off a brilliant The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999). Nolan seems to have little interest in the Odysseus that the ancient bard Homer highlights throughout his epic poem – the wise and wily strategist Odysseus, the princely Odysseus, the godlike Odysseus. His choices align with a typical modern tendency to render ancient literatures and histories ‘relatable’ to us Moderns.


But do we Moderns probe into ancient lore only to ‘relate’ to its characters and events in our own way? Do we just look to map our personal frailties, failings, or follies onto those of the epic heroes, thereby deriving some psychological reassurance, affirmation, or even consolation by leaning on them? Do we watch a film or TV adaptation of Valmiki’s Ramayana, or Homer’s Iliad, to see a reflection of our own vulnerabilities in the conduct of a Rama in exile or an Achilles at war? Maybe some of us do, and maybe all of us do so to a certain extent; but it doesn’t seem likely that this affirmation-seeking and consolation-searching is the be-all and end-all of our craving for ancient epics. For if that were our primary expectation, we need look no further than nineteenth-century literary monuments for TV and film adaptations. From that century onwards, we have a literal explosion of both narrative fiction and fine historical accounts of epic scale, centred on individuals and nations much closer to our own times, propensities, and value systems – and therefore much more prone to our vulnerabilities, and more thoroughly relatable to conditions familiar to us.


Many such modern epic-scale fictional and historical works have been adapted for films and TV with great commercial and critical success: Les Misérables, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, All Quiet on the Western Front, Gandhi, and many more. We should have been satisfied with these alone, without ever bothering to wonder how the heroes of the Bronze Age – or perhaps even further back in time – lived, loved, and led their lot. Film and TV adaptations of modern classics like Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment or Bibhuti Bhushan Bandyopadhyay’s Pather Panchali would have been sufficient if our needs from narratives had been limited to looking into the story-mirror and discovering only ourselves there, even if merely a part of us was reflected.


Neither does it suffice to say that the human condition and its existential challenges have remained more or less the same across vast swathes of time and space, despite a sea change in our material and social conditions. Those who think it sufficient imagine that Achilles’s wrath at Agamemnon, or Rama’s anger at Samudra the sea-god, is nothing more than a natural reaction to their wounded ego or honour, or a frustrated objective they held dear – much in the same way our contemporary celebrities or leaders, would react under similar practical circumstances. Therefore, they claim, we watch adaptations of these epics to compare and exchange notes, unidirectionally as it were, with the ancients. If indeed this were true and sufficient to satisfy our hankering for stories, we would bother ourselves with nothing more than biographies of a Napoleon or a Churchill, or popular historical works on a Netaji Subhas or a Messi, turned into some clever feature film or a documentary TV adaptation. In fact, there is no dearth of such material out there. Mind you, it is several degrees more difficult to construct the world of a Treta or Dvapara Yuga, or the Bronze Age for that matter, than creating a nineteenth- or twentieth-century setup, even with cutting-edge VFX, AR/VR and AI tools at one’s disposal. And yet, several filmmakers have ‘heroically’ ventured to adapt ancient epics and legend-laced histories. Nolan’s The Odyssey is by no means a unique specimen of its kind, just the latest one in a long succession of live-action and animated films and TV series based on epics.


Epics Matter

What, then, do we Moderns really seek in a screen adaptation of an ancient epic? What is it that still makes us so deeply invested in them, that we get agitated if they fail to meet our expectations? Two things above all: Firstly, we look for that trait in the epic hero’s character, which, despite all his vulnerabilities, would redeem him, and in turn redeem us, the modern viewers. Secondly, we look for a certain quality in the way an epic has been narrated, either on paper or on the screen (but especially on the screen), that would capture our imagination, our very being, and allow even the most rational reader or viewer among us to suspend all disbelief for as long as we engage with the story – leaving us with an exalted, high-spirited feeling by the end.


We Moderns are in no way unique in expecting these things from ancient epic. In every age, people have lent an eager ear to these epics, even in their adapted versions. This is why we find a Kalidasa composing long poems and plays based on Valmiki’s Ramayana and Vyasa’s Mahabharata, a Shakespeare producing the tragedy of Troilus and Cressida against the backdrop of the Iliad, a Goethe penning Achilleis and Iphigenia in Tauris, a Nikos Kazantzakis authoring a modern epic sequel to the Odyssey, and a Rabindranath composing odes to Valmiki and Rama, as well as plays and dramatic dialogues based on subplots and characters of the Mahabharata. Each of these adaptations is a milestone in the world’s literary landscape, attesting to their wide popularity across generations. More importantly, each of these works is an interlocutor in an ongoing conversation between the past and the present within its respective literary, theatrical or filmmaking tradition. They are proof that ancient epics are no dead scrolls, but very much alive and kicking.


Despite an overabundance of great literary works produced in the last two centuries, people’s thirst for ancient epic narratives remains unquenched. The tremendous box-office success of Nolan’s The Odyssey, and the mixed yet intense public reaction it has generated, ranging from adulation to outright denunciation, testify to this public thirst for epic narratives.


Redeeming one’s humanity by hearing or watching how the epic hero of yore once redeemed himself, and lifting one’s spirit from a state of hopelessness and meaninglessness to a more vigorous plane of existence – epics are unique in serving these deeply spiritual needs of all humans, no matter how many times those epic plots may have been told and retold.


(The writer is a Kolkata-based educator, writer, researcher and musician who discourses through the spoken and written word with the aim of rekindling the Indic consciousness in a postmodern, neoliberal world. Views personal.)

Comments

bottom of page