August 26, 2025 07:20 AM IST First published on: Aug 26, 2025 at 07:20 AM ISTShareIn May 1894, Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s English-language newspaper, The Mahratta, informed its readers about a surprising new divide-and-rule directive adopted by the colonial government. In a confidential circular, Governor George Robert Canning Harris, former captain of the England cricket team, instructed his officers that Hindus should be told, as a matter of “courtesy”, to stop playing music in religious processions while passing by a mosque. No such rule was applicable, however, when a Muslim procession went past a temple. The stage had been set for a communal conflagration.Sure enough, it occurred a few months later, in July 1894, when the famous palanquins or palkhis of the poet-saints Dnyanoba and Tukaram entered Poona. At Ganesh Peth, as Tukaram’s palkhi was passing through an area with a dargah, some miscreants threw stones at the man who was beating a drum in the procession. A large communal scuffle occurred. Hindus saw this as a Muslim attack on their religion. Tilak’s Marathi-language newspaper Kesari, the most widely read local-language newspaper in the Bombay Presidency, reported that some 50 Muslims had attacked the Tukaram palanquin.AdvertisementAll this happened just a few days before Moharram, the high festival of Muslims in India, which fell on the first 10 days of the first month in the Islamic calendar. For many years past, it was customary for Hindus to participate in the processions that were taken out during Moharram called tabut (a word that literally means “coffin”). As the American poet Lucia C G Grieve observed, the tabut festival involved musical processions, especially using a large number of drums. On the last day of the festival, the tabuts were taken to the seaside or bank of a river and immersed. In Bombay, tabut processions were carried out by both Shias and Sunnis.However, after the palkhi episode, popular regional-language newspapers in the Bombay Presidency like Kalpataru, Mumbai Vaibhav, Indu Prakash, Deenbandhu, and Subodh Patrika, advised their readers, mostly Hindus, not to make tabuts or take part in the Moharram festival that year. Handbills were pasted on temple walls containing this message. The Poona Vaibhav went a step further. It told its readers that if Hindus wished to “have similar rejoicings”, they could start their own “procession in honour of one of their own gods on a suitable occasion”.What happened next was interesting. Newspapers began reporting that an old Hindu festival, which was hitherto mostly observed privately, was going to be celebrated in Poona on a grand scale that year. On July 22, 1894, the Vyapari reported that preparations were on to celebrate the Ganpati festival with “more than the usual éclat”. “Chairs of state for idols are being made and splendidly fitted up in the town like the tabuts,” wrote the Poona Vaibhav the following month, “and bands of persons are seen in the streets melodiously singing songs in glorification of Ganpati and Shankar”.AdvertisementIn other words, the Ganesh Chaturthi festival that we now know of today had its origins in 1894 in Poona, as a Hindu substitute for Moharram. This was not lost on contemporary observers. In October 1894, The Mahratta explained the phenomenon that was taking place. The two sadhu poets, Tukaram and Dnyandev, were the “great favourites” of the lower classes, who considered them to be deities more beloved than the puranic Gods. When the Tukaram palkhi was seen to have been insulted by Muslims in Poona, the lower classes decided to abstain from the Moharram festival. “But their love to give themselves up to song and dance and to buffoonery for a certain number of days during every year emained ungratified,” said The Mahratta. “They therefore started the Ganpati festival.” “The festival was not a new one,” wrote The Mahratta, and had been “observed from time immemorial”. However, it was “modified…so as to resemble the Moharram”.Like the tabuts, on September 13, 1894, the Ganpatis were carried for immersion in a public procession. “In the place of the small Ganpatis which we have for years past been accustomed to see in Poona”, wrote The Times of India the following day, “the Hindoos have on this occasion made large imposing figures of their God of Wisdom”, which they “prominently exhibited in the streets”, under “mandaps” designed like “the taboots”.There are many myths that prevail about the founding of the Ganpati festival. One of these is that it was organised for disseminating anti-colonial messages. This was probably not true. However, what was remarkable about Ganesh Chaturthi is that it united all classes of Hindus under a common banner.The Indian National Congress, founded in 1885, was then a privileged movement of educated elites and aristocrats. In 1894, against the backdrop of the Ganpati festival, a new kind of politics was beginning to emerge in India, with leaders like Tilak who appealed to the religious fervour of the masses.most readTilak felt that Ganpati was important for “national regeneration”. As Kesari explained in September 1895, a nation required three things: A common religion, common laws and a common language. The British had given India laws and a common language. However, Tilak felt that the other element of nationality, a “united religion”, had to be supplied by Indians themselves “if we hope to rise one day as a united nation.” It would perhaps not be incorrect to say that some of Tilak’s ideas of nationalism are now considered conventional wisdom in the corridors of power in New Delhi.The 1890s resonate in more ways than one in modern-day India. The “Harris Shield” inter-school cricket tournament in Mumbai, best known for the 664-run partnership between Sachin Tendulkar and Vinod Kambli in 1988, is named after Governor Harris, whose divide-and-rule policy on Hindu musical processions unwittingly gave birth to the Ganpati festival in its modern form.The writer is an advocate at the Bombay High Court