Ganpati Idols: Inside a Workshop Before the Festival

The bus from Pune drops you at Pen and the first thing you notice is that nothing announces itself. There is no arch, no sign that says idol town. You have to walk into the lanes off the main road before it starts: a shutter half up, and behind it, forty white Ganpatis in a row, all facing the same way, all waiting to be painted.

Pen is a small town in Raigad, roughly between Mumbai and Pune, and it has been making Ganesh idols for more than a hundred years. The number people quote is around 350 workshops turning out something like two and a half lakh idols in a season. I went in the second week of the run-up to Ganesh Chaturthi — this year the festival lands on 14 September — because I wanted to see the number as a real thing rather than a statistic, and because I am sceptical of most claims made about handmade goods and wanted to check them against a floor covered in plaster dust.

What a workshop actually looks like

Not a studio. That is the first correction. The word "workshop" makes people imagine a single artisan bent over one figure. What you find instead is closer to a small factory that happens to be run by hand.

A working room in Pen, in August, has a few fixed features:

• Moulds, stacked like shells. Two-part fibre or metal moulds for the face, the trunk, the crown, the folded legs, the mouse at the base. A large idol is not carved; it is cast in parts and joined.
• A master's original somewhere out of the way. Every design begins as one sculpted prototype. The moulds are taken from that. After that, the room is producing replicas, not sculptures, and the honest workshops will tell you so.
• Rows of unpainted casts drying. This is most of the floor. White, faceless-until-detailed, leaned against every wall.
• A painting corner where the work slows right down — eyes last, always eyes, because the eyes are what people look at when they bring the idol home.

The rhythm is not romantic. It is a queue. Casting happens weeks out; joining and sanding fill the middle; painting is the bottleneck at the end, which is why in the last fortnight the lights stay on late.

The clay question, without the sermon

You cannot write about Ganpati idols now without the shadu-versus-POP argument, so let me try to do it plainly, because it is usually delivered as a lecture.

There are two common materials. Plaster of Paris is light, cheap, takes fine detail, and does not dissolve — which is exactly the problem, because most idols end in water at visarjan, and POP does not go back to being anything. Shadu maati is natural river clay; in Pen a lot of it is brought in as powder from Bhavnagar in Gujarat. It is heavier, it is fussier to work, a tall idol in shadu is genuinely harder to keep from cracking as it dries, and it costs more. In return it breaks down in water the way clay is supposed to.

The honest picture I saw is a town mid-shift, not converted. Plenty of workshops now make pure shadu idols finished in natural colours, and they will show you, and they are proud of it. Plenty of others still run POP because a customer wants a six-foot idol light enough for four young men to carry, and shadu at that height is a real engineering headache. Anyone who tells you Pen is now entirely eco-friendly is selling something. Anyone who tells you the shadu idols are a gimmick has not lifted one.

If you are buying a small idol for a home installation, shadu is the straightforward choice and increasingly easy to find. If you want the reasons behind the whole ritual of bringing a clay form home and returning it to water, we wrote separately about the common mistakes people make setting up Ganpati at home. The short version the potters gave me was less theological: clay came from water, so clay goes back to water. That is the entire idea.

The smell of the room

I notice smell before most things, so this is the part I actually came for.

A shadu workshop smells of wet earth — that flat, mineral, after-rain smell, stronger near the mixing where the powder is still being turned into slip. Under it there is the sharper chemical note of the POP room if the workshop runs both, and the thin turpentine edge of paint at the finishing end. Early in the morning, before the casting starts, there is usually one more layer: a stick of agarbatti burning at the small shrine every workshop keeps in a corner, lit before the day's work the same way a shop is opened with it.

That last detail is the one that stayed with me, because it is the least commercial thing in the building. The idols going out of that door are inventory. The one in the corner, in front of which someone lights incense at seven in the morning, is not for sale. We make incense ourselves, in Bihar, a long way from Pen, and I recognised the gesture completely — the small flame and the smoke that says the working day has permission to begin. It is the same everywhere people make things by hand.

The economics nobody puts on the poster

Because I am the sort of person who asks about money, here is what the craft actually rests on.

• It is seasonal and brutal. Most of a workshop's income arrives in a few weeks. A bad monsoon that slows drying, or a shortage of good clay, hits the whole year.
• It is family labour. The skill runs down households; the painting hands you watch have often been painting since childhood, which is not a charming detail so much as an economic one.
• The margins are thin and the competition is the factory next door, making the same design from a similar mould. What separates them is finishing — the eyes, the fold of the dhoti, the steadiness of the line — which is exactly the part that cannot be sped up.

This is why "handmade" is worth checking rather than trusting. In Pen it is largely true, but true in an unglamorous way: handmade here means a lot of hands, working fast, under a deadline, on a thin margin, keeping a hundred-year skill alive mostly because it is what the town knows how to do.

What to take from it, if you are not buying an idol

You might read all this from a flat in London or Dubai with no plan to install a Ganpati at all. Here is what I took away, and I think it travels.

The idols in Pen are not special because they are old or blessed on the shelf. They are ordinary until the eyes go on and someone carries one home and, for ten days, treats a shaped piece of river clay as a guest — feeds it, sits with it, and then walks it to the water and lets it dissolve. The object was never the point. The attention was.

That is a useful thing to remember about anything you keep on a shelf and light a flame in front of, festival or not. The material is just clay, or wood, or a rolled stick of scented paste. What you bring to it is the part that lasts the ten days — and the part that, unlike the idol, does not have to end.