The Hindu Business Line : When Ganesha went places

BETWEEN the small clay Ganesha idols on the ground floor of Kalpana Kala Mandir and the big fibre-glass one on its second floor, ran a story of overseas travel by the country's much loved elephant God.

This town, for long the capital of Ganesha idol production in Maharashtra, regularly sends a small part of its output abroad, essentially to NRIs.

Shrikant Vamanrao Deodhar, fourth generation in the trade and owner of Kalpana Kala Mandir, too has his share of such shipments.

But a couple of years ago, Deodhar who majored in sculpture from Mumbai's J.J. School of Arts before returning to his family business, found himself making Ganeshas in Switzerland.

It all started with Johannes Beltz, an assistant curator at Zurich's Rietburg Museum, who is now in Pune for a year researching the Dalit movement.

Intrigued by the city's Ganapathy festival, easily the biggest celebration in the State, his inquiries soon led him to Pen and Deodhar, reputed to be the town's biggest idol manufacturer. In May 2003, he invited Deodhar to Zurich for a two-week workshop on making Ganesha idols.

At the museum, participants were shown a DVD film of the whole festival, from making the clay idol to how it was worshipped at various households. In a second hall, they were treated to Ganesha statues gathered from collections across Europe. Then, they came to a third hall to see Deodhar making clay Ganesha idols. "There was a big response to the workshop," Deodhar said.

For the former student of sculpture, the trip was an eye-opener. Some of the participants were themselves trained sculptors like Deodhar, but working in other professions to earn a livelihood.

"Art is a strange education. At one level, you are full of the Michelangelos and Rembrandts of the world. At another, you are without an easy means of livelihood and struggling to respect the mundane aspects of survival."

Europe showed him that struggle was everywhere in the art world. It may have also helped endorse the choice Deodhar himself made.

"He is different from the rest of us, his preferences are more modern,'' B.L. Pawar, Vice- President of Pen's Sri Ganesh Murthikar Ani Vyavasayik Kalyankari Mandal, had said of Deodhar.

Yet a black, clay sculpture of an old man in a corner of Kalpana Kala Mandir's ground floor, was all that betrayed Deodhar's formal training and individual creativity.

The rest of the floor as indeed the factory's second and third floors, were taken up by beautifully proportioned, well-crafted Ganesha idols. It was row upon row of mass-produced statues. Deodhar had made a pragmatic choice - art followed survival.

But what he loves to remember about the Zurich outing, his first trip abroad, was that the dates of the workshop were carefully picked by Beltz to coincide with the actual festival in India.

Predictably therefore, the two-week exercise culminated in a visarjan, immersion of the Ganesha idol in the local lake. Zurich's Indian community was invited to participate in the procession. A year later in 2004, Deodhar went to Berlin for a demonstration of his craft. In the bigger city, a crowd bigger than what he had encountered at Zurich, turned up to see Ganesha.

Now, the invitation on hand is from Netherlands and Deodhar plans to be there in December.

The event is an exhibition on Indian culture and the organisers want to open it with a session devoted to Ganesha idols. The sculptor from Pen is more relaxed this time, Europe no more a strange place or unknown clay.

"Initially, I was worried about their clay. Would an idol made with their clay and using our traditional techniques, hold together?" But it did.

If anything Deodhar was only confused by the more evolved descriptions of sculpting mediums that he met in Zurich. "I had a hard time telling shopkeepers what I meant by plaster of paris and after that, choosing from the myriad grades of the material they had." Not any more though, he is an experienced hand in Europe.

He hopes to take the light and durable fibre-glass Ganesha with him to Netherlands. Perhaps Pawar was right about Deodhar being "modern".

One didn't come across a fibre-glass Ganesha elsewhere in Pen. Or for that matter, an idol maker with a Ganesha immersed in Lake Zurich.

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