An elephant and a mouse

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Swati Chopra [1]

To those unfamiliar with the Hindu pantheon, our penchant for worshipping animal forms might appear strange or at best, remnants of an animistic faith. The latter assumption would not be entirely untrue, as there has existed a worldview that imbues nature and all its forms with sacredness.

Not only animals, but rivers, rocks, trees, groves, mountains are revered as expressions of this perspective that saw the divine in everything. It is a non-anthropomorphic perspective attuned to the importance of each node on the web of life.
On Ganesha Chaturthi, we celebrate a deity with the head of an elephant, whose mount is, quite strangely, a mouse. This seems an improbability, given the discrepancy in their sizes. Quite literally, an elephant rides a mouse. However, nothing in Indic religious lore is what it seems, rich as it is in the symbolism that thrived in oral cultures, enabling the remembering and recounting of stories, myths and legends interwoven with social memories and meanings.
So, Ganesha’s mouse stands for the ego-self, which the spiritual aspirant is expected to recognise and retain control over. His other attributes, too, offer goals for the seeker to aspire towards. His large, elephantine ears denote the power to listen and imbibe. Worshippers believe they symbolize Ganesha’s sensitivity to pleas made to him. As a “remover of obstacles”, one of his roles, the skill of listening comes in handy.
Ganesha usually makes for an endearing figure because of his fondness for modak, which also expresses itself in his ample paunch. Nutritionists and weight-watchers might baulk at it, but it is another symbolic trait — one that is, according to one interpretation, thought to suggest an ability to ingest the vagaries of life without letting them upset one’s mental equilibrium.
The legend of Ganesha’s creation is a story of transformation. Shiva’s spouse, Parvati, in his absence, creates a little boy out of earth and bestows him with prana, the breath of life. Soon, she forges a mother-son relationship with him. One day, the boy stands guard while his mother bathes. Just then, Shiva returns home, to find a strange little boy refusing him entry. Enraged, he chops the boy’s head off. Parvati is inconsolable and entreats Shiva to restore her “child” to her. The Lord obliges, only, the boy now has an elephant’s head. All is well as Shiva, too, adopts the child as his own.
This story, if taken literally, would have a rather gruesome edge to it. However, decapitation in Indic myths often has a resonance of taking off that part of oneself that is a hindrance on the spiritual path — the ego. That it is identified with the head shows how much a part of us it really is, and how it often takes a decisive effort to see it for what it is and let go of it. Ganesha reminds of this possibility in more ways than one.

Swati Chopra writes on spirituality and mindful living.