This is an excerpt from a Shahi Tharoor article about the 1995 phenomenon which i too personally witnessed and believe in.
I loved this article and agree with his thoughts. If this article seems to long please read the highlighted portions.
---------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------- -----------------------------
THE MANY FACES OF
Lord Ganesh
By Shashi Tharoor
The TAJ magazine
First Quarter 2002
In late September 1995, word spread around the world that statues of Ganesh had begun drinking milk. In some cases, statues of his divine parents, Shiva and Parvati, were also reported to be imbibing these liquid offerings, but Ganesh it was who took the elephant's share. Early on Thursday September 21, the rumours started in Delhi that the gods were drinking milk; it was said that an idol of Ganesh in a suburb of the capital had swallowed half a cup. Within hours, the frenzy had spread around the globe as reports came in of temples and private domestic shrines in places as far removed as Long Island and Hong Kong witnessing the same phenomenon. At the Vishwa temple in London's Indian-dominated Southall district, a 15-inch statue was said to be drinking hundreds of spoons of milk offerings; the august London Times reported on its front page that "in 24 hours 10,000 saw it drink". At the Geeta Bhavan temple in Manchester, prodigious quantities were ingested by a three-inch silver statue of Ganesh. Hard-bitten British tabloid journalists, looking for a fraud to debunk, filmed and photographed the phenomenon and professed themselves flabbergasted. "I gazed in awe," confessed the man from the Daily Star; his rival from the Sun "gawped in disbelief".
| | | Dancing Ganesh, Tibet. 18th century. Bronze, partially gilt, with semi-precious stones. Courtesy The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. |
Simple physics?
In India, the rationalists were quick to react. It was, they averred, a matter of simple physics. Molecules on the rough stone and marble surfaces of the statues had created a "capillary action' which sucked in the droplets of milk. These were not really absorbed into the statue but formed a thin layer of droplets on the surface which would be visible if the statue were dark. A team of government scientists proceeded to demonstrate this on television, placing green powder in the milk and showing a green stain spreading over the face of a white marble statue. Mass hysteria was alleged; Indian priests who live off the offerings of devotees in the temples were merely trying to whip up more custom, said some; it was all politics, said others, pointing to the need for the flagging Hindutva movement to attract the credulous to their credo.
Delhi's Pioneer newspaper published a photograph of a spout emerging from the back of a temple from which milk poured into a bucket; the implication was that it was chicanery, not divine ingestion, that accounted for the disappearing milk in the temples.
| | | Parvati playing with Ganesh. By Abanindranath Tagore (1871-1951). Courtesy Indian Museum, Calcutta. |
The rationalists and the believers were probably both right. That is in the nature of faith; scientific faith, no less than religious, tends to confirm itself. I was travelling when the story broke, and when it was reported that the milk-drinking ceased in most places on Friday afternoon, I thought I had missed the miracle altogether. A week later, in Texas, I was told of a house in a Houston suburb where the phenomenon had persisted. Slightly sceptical but decidedly curious, I went to see it for myself, and was driven there in a Mercedes by a worldly Sikh businesswoman who had neither a religious nor a pecuniary interest in seeing the miracle vindicated. We drew up at an ordinary middle-class Indian home; ropes had been strung outside to control the throngs, but there were none on this day, it being the eighth day and a working day to boot.
At the Vishwa temple in London's Indian-dominated
Southall district, a 15-inch statue
of Ganesh was said to be drinking hundreds
of spoons of milk offerings; the august
London Times reported on its front page that
"in 24 hours 10,000 saw it drink".
Ganesh and Kartikeya.
Company School watercolour.
Deccan. 1830.
Courtesy Phillips Antiques.
The lady of the house took us to her little shrine, an unremarkable pujaroom like so many in Hindu homes around the world. She had a number of statues and portraits, but only one was drinking milk: a tiny terracotta statue of Ganesh, no more than two and a half inches high. My Sikh friend, with trembling hand, extended her spoon towards the miniature trunk of the statue and we both watched the milk disappear into the little Ganesh. It was now my turn; with callous incompetence I held the spoon firm and level and the milk held steady. "Tilt it a bit," our hostess urged, and when I did the milk duly disappeared into the statue. It was not as if I had poured the milk out, because then it would have flowed differently; nor was the milk simply spilled, though a couple of drops fell to the floor. Instead there seemed to be a gentle drawing out of the milk by an unknown force, perhaps capillary action. (Om capillary actioneyeh namaha?) The statue, we were told, had been "fed" some 180 times a day for eight days; surely its capillary channels and overall absorptive capacity would have been exhausted by now? As we stood mulling these thoughts, a young Indian woman in T-shirt and jeans, evidently part of the new generation of subcontinental Americans, came to take her turn before the statue. Ganesh drank willingly from her extended spoon.
The lady of the house took no money, accepted no offerings. Her husband was neither a priest nor a Hindu revivalist; he held a senior executive position in a Houston
computer firm. When we spoke to her she exuded the simple religiosity of so many middle-class, and I dare say middle-aged, women; she was touched by what was happening in her own home, she believed implicitly in the miracle, she did not question its nature or purpose, she sought nothing from it (indeed put up with considerable inconvenience because of it) except vindication of her own personal faith. Every night she bathed the little statue and put it "to bed" in a little golden throne, swaddled in muslin; the next morning Ganesh was back on the low pedestal in the puja-room, thirsty as ever.
I did not know how to react to what I had just seen. I had come out of curiosity, not to explore or affirm belief. The milk-drinking was essentially irrelevant to "my" Hinduism; my faith was neither strengthened nor exalted by the sight of a statue drinking milk, nor would it have been shaken or diluted if Ganesh had refused to imbibe. I was prepared to believe that there might be a fully rational explanation for the event, but I was equally willing to accept that something might have occurred that was not readily susceptible to the demystification of scientists. I believe the world has more questions to pose than science has yet found answers for, and so have no intellectual difficulty with the notion of the supernatural. Nor, more to the point, do the millions of devotees who flocked to temples worldwide, who saw in the phenomenon a simple message from the heavens that the gods remained interested in the affairs of ordinary mortals.
Edited by Aparna_BD - 19 years ago
Members Lounge
Anupamaa
