By V. Vijayalakshmi, IANS
Pune : The by-lanes of Kumbarwada, an area dominated by the potter community, are now dotted with colourful idols of elephant-headed god Ganesha, with the five-day festival to mark his birth barely a few days away.
The idols are the fruits of labour of hundreds of artisans, who have been toiling away the entire year, even battling rising costs, to meet the demand of customers from all over India and even abroad.
Forty-five-year-old Ganesh Murlidhar Khedkar has been making idols for the past 25 years. His workshop, Akshya Arts, is now in its fourth generation.
Khedkar’s wife Vanitha, who is the driving force of the workshop, told IANS: “Our Ganpathis go to Hyderabad, Karnataka, Haryana and even out of the country to the US, Europe and Australia.”
According to Khedkar, “Ganesha is the closest and the most loved lord. Lal Bakka Raja Ganesha – an idol design showing Ganesha sitting on a throne with a reddish tinge – is the most popular this year.”
Incidentally, his eldest daughter Anuradha, now in Class 12, is an adept in readying the idols. Busy painting a Ganesha idol, she says, “I want to be a chartered accountant but will pursue this as a hobby.”
Khedkar’s workshop has had customers buying from there for generations. Orders for his idols are booked two to three months in advance – last-minute customers usually return disappointed.
The Ganesh Chaturthi festival – which is celebrated in a big way in Maharashtra and also states like Gujarat, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh – is set to start Saturday.
Khedkar’s workshop this year has orders for 3,000 Ganeshas, and last year they sold close to 2,000 Ganeshas. The bigger idols – around six and a half feet high – this year have been priced at around Rs.5,000.
But it’s not all hunky dory for the idol makers.
“This year, plaster of Paris (PoP) prices have gone up by 30-35 percent but the customer still wants to pay the same amount for the idols as last year. We do not get any benefits from the state. If we approach the bank they charge us 15-20 percent interest rates. Though we like to do this work we would not want our kids to follow the profession as it pays so less and demands so much labour,” says Vanitha.
Just around Akshya Arts is yet another workshop owned by Rahul Shinde.
Shinde has been in the business since 1990. Most his artisans belong to the potter community. His father started the workshop in 1960.
“It is round the year work for us. After Diwali, the idol-making starts. They are ready by May, painting starts in June and only before Ganesh Chaturthi are the idols ready to be picked up by customers.”
The demand for Ganesha idols abroad has grown tremendously – earlier only one or two used to go because of stringent policies and the high cost involved to ship them. But now things have changed considerably. NRI buyers come and select idols and buy them in huge quantities.
Originally Ganesha idols were made with ‘shadu’ clay, which is easy to dissolve in water, but nowadays POP – mostly from Rajasthan and Gujarat – is more popular.
A walk around the Kumbarwada by-lanes in the Pune city reveals a sea of colourful Ganesha idols known by their various designs. Maharaja-pose Ganpati, Ganesha riding a mouse, Ganesha sitting on a Shiva linga, a Sheshnag or a Narsimha, a lotus, a peacock and so on. The idol of Dagduseth Ganpati, the richest Ganpati temple in Pune, is yet again very popular.
Every year, nearly 1-1.2 million Ganpati idols are made in Pune and surrounding areas. People from other parts of the country also come here to buy them.
Artisans with medium-sized workshops selling 2,000-2,500 idols last year made anything between Rs.150,000 and Rs. 200,000.
Shinde says, “Compared to the hard work this profession demands, the compensation is very less. A Ganpati has to be lifted about a hundred times before it finds its place in the shelf as a finished idol.”
Vikram and Shashikant S. Rahukar are two brothers who have taken over their father’s business of making Ganesha idols. But they only cater to their old customers and concentrate more on supplying raw materials to artists.
“The workshop owners have to buy POP at the same cost as industrialists, there is no concession and so is the case with paints,” says Shashikant Rahukar.
Making Ganesha idols may have developed into a cottage industry in Maharashtra, but it still continues to be very unorganised.
According to artisan Praveen Kumar: “There are no regulations, a salesman can earn a lot but at the same time the artists who create the idol get the bare minimum for their hard work.”