Torrential rains in Maharashtra have hit Ganesh idol-makers of Raigad district, the nucleus of the idol-crafting industry that employs thousands of artisans. Flooding has inundated workshops in and around Pen taluka with water from the Patalganga river and the creeks, leading to idols being damaged or washed away. Workshop owners say they face a hard struggle ahead to complete orders for the Ganesh festival in September.
For around three decades, the residents Pen, Hamrapur and nearby villages, located over 60 km from Mumbai, have made Ganesh idols for a living. The area supplies both Plaster of Paris (PoP) and shadu maati (clay) idols to sellers and customers in India and abroad. In 2023, Pen’s Ganesh idols secured the coveted Geographical Indication (GI) tag.
Pen and Hamrapur have an estimated 600 workshops, which produce around a million idols annually. The industry employs around 250,000 people in Pen taluka and has an estimated annual turnover of Rs 200 crore.
There are many others who depend on the industry—the ubiquitous ‘Ganpatichi gaadi’ trucks ferrying idols, suppliers, wholesalers, retailers and local tea-snacks vendors, who feed the artisans slogging in the workshops.
Kunal Patil, an idol-maker, said workshops in Tambadshet, Dadar, Kalave and Johe had been affected by the overflowing Patalganga river. “Some workshops were washed away. Some idols were lost in the heavy flow of flood waters,” said Patil, pegging the losses between 500 and 1,000 idols in various stages of preparation.
Idol-maker Avinash Bhoir, from Borgaon in Pen, said the floods had come as a double whammy for an industry already dealing with the impact of the West Asia on shipping lines, which affected the dispatch of idols to Indian families abroad, besides the rise in input costs of paint, plastic bags and fuel. “In Pen town, many workshops manufacture idols from clay. The ingress of water has damaged clay idols, which are delicate and dissolve in water,” he explained.
Wholesale rates of a two feet-tall PoP idol have risen from Rs 1,800 to Rs 2,000 while that of a one and a half feet-tall clay idol was up by around Rs 300 than last year’s price of Rs 1,300. Retailers in cities like Mumbai and Pune purchase idols in bulk. Mumbai has around 12,000 public Ganesh mandals and a requirement of over 200,000 idols for household pujas.
“Transport costs have also risen,” said Bhoir, adding that the cost of sending idols to Panvel, located around 40 km from Mumbai, by truck had soared to Rs 5,000 from Rs 3,000 last year.
Another idol-maker noted that the floods had hurt clay idol-makers more, but many workshop owners were protected from losses through insurance.
It was Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak who popularised public celebrations of the Ganesh festival since 1894, marking a break from tradition when this was confined to households. At the time, the idols were made from locally available clay.
Pen emerged as a major Ganesh idol-crafting hub in the 1950s because of access to major markets such as Pune and Mumbai. The clay available in the hills near Pen was of inferior quality. Yet proximity to Mumbai worked in its favour. Cargo ships ferrying Mangalore tiles and other material often docked at the Mumbai port.
Sacks of refined white clay from Gujarat were often loaded onto these vessels to add weight for the ship’s stability at sea. Merchants sold these sacks at throwaway prices in Mumbai, from where it was ferried by boat to Antora port, over a mile away from Pen. This helped sculptors get raw material for their idols.
According to ‘Handicrafts of Maharashtra: Clay Images of Pen’ in the Census of India, 1961, N.G. ‘Rajabhau’ Deodhar of Pen was a pioneering artist who introduced PoP as raw material for preparing decorative images. Subsequently, Ganesh idols were also prepared using PoP, but these idols were for decorative purposes only.
Gradually, the use of PoP for making idols caught on due to the ease of process. Today, Ganesh mandals such as ‘Lalbagcha Raja’ in Mumbai are known for their huge idols of the Lord. The practice of consecrating such larger-than-life PoP idols have their origins in tinsel town.
The movie Navrang (1959), produced and directed by the legendary V. Shantaram, had shown an 11 ft-tall Ganpati idol. It had been crafted in-house by his Rajkamal Studio in Parel. The idol was eventually immersed ceremoniously, says V. Shantaram son Kiran Shantaram. Gradually, the trend of PoP idols came in.
By the 1980s, Pen had around 500 workshops manufacturing idols from clay and PoP, noted Shrikant Deodhar, who is N.G. Deodhar’s nephew and a fourth-generation sculptor and idol-maker. Hamrapur and adjoining areas emerged as idol manufacturing hubs in the 1990s, with workshops in Pen sub-contracting work to them. Retailers from Mumbai and other cities too found it affordable than paying high rent for their workshops.
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