ಗಣೇಶ ಚತುರ್ಥಿ | Ganesha Chaturthi

Ganesha Chaturthi is the birthday of Ganapati and the largest festival of Bhadrapada. It falls on the fourth tithi of the bright fortnight, and in Karnataka it begins the evening before with Gauri, who is brought home on the tritiya and taken back by her son the next day.

Why the date is decided at midday

Almost every tithi based observance is fixed by the tithi current at sunrise. This one is not. Ganapati is held to have been born during madhyahna, and the day that carries the festival is the day on which the chaturthi is running during that window.

Madhyahna here is not noon by the clock. The interval from sunrise to sunset is divided into five equal parts and the third is madhyahna, so in most of Karnataka it runs from a little before eleven in the morning to about half past one. If the chaturthi covers madhyahna on two consecutive days, the earlier is taken.

This single rule is the commonest reason two almanacs print two different dates. A chaturthi that begins at, say, ten in the morning touches no sunrise until the following day, so a calendar applying the ordinary sunrise rule would push the festival back by a day, while a calendar applying the madhyahna rule keeps it on the day the tithi began. Since madhyahna is computed from local sunrise and sunset, the window itself differs by place, and a difference of a few minutes in when a tithi starts can move the date for one city and not another. Anudina prints the tithi start and end times so the decision is inspectable.

What is done

A clay image is brought home, life is invoked into it, and it is worshipped with the sixteen services and with patri, the twenty one leaves, of which durva grass is the one nobody omits. The offering is modaka or kadubu, steamed and filled with coconut and jaggery, along with panchakajjaya, chakkuli and holige. The image stays for one and a half days, three, five, seven, nine or eleven, according to family custom, and is then immersed. Public installations in pandals, which in Karnataka are called sarvajanika Ganeshotsava, usually keep theirs until Anant Chaturdashi. Clay without added colour and immersion in a tank rather than a river has become the normal advice, and several municipalities now provide immersion tanks.

The moon on that night

The moon is not to be looked at on the night of the chaturthi. One who sees it is said to incur mithya dosha, the blame of a theft or misdeed not committed. The story given is the Syamantaka episode of the Bhagavata: Krishna saw the chaturthi moon and was afterwards accused of having taken the Syamantaka jewel, and cleared himself only by recovering it from Jambavan.

The remedy, if the moon is seen by accident, is to hear or recite the Syamantaka story, and in many households a short verse is repeated instead, the one that begins with the lion killing Prasena and Jambavan killing the lion. There is also a folk remedy of getting oneself scolded by a neighbour, on the reasoning that a small undeserved blame discharges a large one. The prohibition is usually reckoned to apply to the evening of the chaturthi and, in stricter accounts, to the evening of the tritiya before it.

A distinction worth keeping

The fourth tithi of every bright fortnight is Vinayaka Chaturthi and the fourth of every dark fortnight is Sankashti Chaturthi. They are different observances: Sankashti is decided at moonrise, is kept as a fast broken after the moon is seen, and the moon there is looked for rather than avoided. Bhadrapada shukla chaturthi is the year birthday and the greatest of the Vinayaka Chaturthis, not a separate kind of day.