Tradition · Ganapatya sect

Gāṇapatya tradition

Also known as Ganapatya, Ganapatyas, Ganesha worship

Date

from about the sixth century

Function

Religious institution & practice

Tradition

Gaṇeśa Purāṇa; Mudgala Purāṇa

Confidence

Established / referenced

Worth knowing

Tilak turned the household Gaṇeśa festival into a public one in Pune in 1893, as an assembly the colonial state could not easily ban. A sectarian devotion became a political instrument and then a national festival, in that order, within about fifty years.

Connections (3)

• Pilgrimage order ofMoraya Gosāvi

  Moraya is the figure through whom the Gāṇapatya tradition became a Maharashtrian mass devotion rather than a textual sect. His name is in the cry raised at every immersion — Ganapati Bappā Moraya — which puts a seventeenth-century saint into the mouth of anyone who has ever carried an idol to the water.

• Pilgrimage order ofMoreshwar, Baramati

  Morgāv is the ādi-pīṭha of the Gāṇapatya tradition, the first seat, and the circuit of eight is the sect's geography written on the ground. The Gaṇeśa Purāṇa's claim that Gaṇeśa is the supreme reality rather than the remover of obstacles for other gods is what the eight shrines are there to assert.

• Pilgrimage order ofShaniwarwada, Pune

  The Peshwas were Chitpāvan Brahmins with Gaṇeśa as their family deity, and Shaniwarwada's court made his worship a state matter. That patronage is why the eight shrines were rebuilt in stone in the eighteenth century and why Pune, not Morgāv, is the circuit's modern starting point. Tilak turned the household Gaṇeśa festival into a public one in Pune in 1893 as an assembly the colonial state could not easily ban, which is how a sect's deity became a national festival.

Sources

Wikipedia, “Ganapatya”. Sangeet Natak Akademi and Ministry of Textiles documentation, and the standard field studies.

• Wikipedia — Ganapatya