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By:

Bharati Dubey

17 May 2026 at 7:08:10 am

Ganpati Bappa and the Movies

How Mumbai’s studios and streets celebrated cinema Mumbai: Mumbai’s Ganesh Utsav has always been more than a religious celebration. For generations, it has also intersected with the city’s other great passion-cinema. Long before photographs of stars welcoming Ganpati Bappa at home became an annual fixture on television and social media, the festival had a presence inside Mumbai’s film studios. Beyond the studio gates, Ganesh mandals were also bringing movies directly to neighbourhood...

Ganpati Bappa and the Movies

How Mumbai’s studios and streets celebrated cinema Mumbai: Mumbai’s Ganesh Utsav has always been more than a religious celebration. For generations, it has also intersected with the city’s other great passion-cinema. Long before photographs of stars welcoming Ganpati Bappa at home became an annual fixture on television and social media, the festival had a presence inside Mumbai’s film studios. Beyond the studio gates, Ganesh mandals were also bringing movies directly to neighbourhood audiences by turning ordinary streets into makeshift theatres. Veteran film journalist and analyst Dilip Thakur, who grew up in Girgaon and has observed Mumbai’s film culture over several decades, remembers both worlds. “Ganesh Utsav and cinema have had a very old relationship in Mumbai. It wasn’t only about film stars bringing Ganpati home. The studios, the workers and even the neighbourhood mandals were all part of this culture,” says Thakur. Ganpati Tradition Thakur points to V. Shantaram’s Rajkamal Studio while recalling the early relationship between Mumbai’s studios and Ganesh Utsav. The tradition, he says, can be linked to the period of Navrang, when an elaborate set involving a Ganesh idol and elephants was created at the studio. What began in the world of filmmaking subsequently developed into an annual studio celebration. “During Navrang, a grand set was created with Ganpati and elephants. That became an inspiration for the Ganesh festival at Rajkamal Studio, and the tradition continued,” Thakur recalls. The importance of the celebration lay not merely in its association with a celebrated filmmaker. Studios of that era had large permanent communities of technicians, craftsmen and other workers, and festivals became occasions for everyone connected with the premises. “Studios in those days were like families. Actors, technicians and workers celebrated together. Ganpati was not merely a celebrity occasion—it belonged to the entire studio,” says Thakur. Entry to Devotees Raj Kapoor’s RK Studios in Chembur developed its own distinctive Ganpati tradition. The studio’s Holi celebrations became legendary in the film industry, but its Ganesh Utsav also drew people from outside the film fraternity. The Ganpati was installed close to the main studio building, and devotees could enter the premises for darshan. “People always talk about RK Studios’ Holi, but its Ganpati celebration was also very special. The idol was installed near the main building, and ordinary people could come inside the studio for darshan,” Thakur says. For a movie fan, this meant something unusual: an opportunity to enter the premises associated with Raj Kapoor and some of Hindi cinema’s most famous films while participating in a festival shared by the wider city. The immersion procession added another dimension to the tradition. Different generations of the Kapoor family participated over the years, from Raj Kapoor to Randhir Kapoor and Rishi Kapoor, and later Ranbir Kapoor. The procession travelled from Chembur towards Girgaon Chowpatty, passing through parts of central Mumbai along the way. As round-the-clock television news expanded, cameras increasingly followed the Kapoor family and the procession. “The procession would travel from Chembur towards Girgaon Chowpatty through areas such as Kurla and Sion. Once television news channels began covering it extensively, the RK Ganpati visarjan became a major media event,” says Thakur. The connection survived beyond the studio’s heyday. Thakur recalls that people associated with RK Studios continued the Ganpati tradition for some time even after regular studio activity had ceased. “Even after the studio stopped functioning as before, people who had worked there continued the tradition for some time. That tells you how emotionally connected the workers were to the RK Ganpati,” he says. Mumbai Galli Thakur’s most vivid memories, however, come from outside the studios. Ganesh Utsav once provided an unusual second life for films that neighbourhood audiences had missed during their theatrical runs. During the 1960s and 1970s, local Ganesh mandals organised outdoor screenings with 16mm projectors. A screen—or sometimes simply an available wall—could transform a narrow lane into a neighbourhood movie theatre for an evening. “We called it ‘Galli Cinema’. A 16mm projector would arrive, a screen would be put up, and the entire lane would become a cinema hall,” Thakur recalls. Growing up in Girgaon, he experienced this culture first-hand. Films featuring stars such as Shammi Kapoor and Dev Anand were among those he remembers watching during Ganesh festivities in the 1970s. “I watched many films like this in the 1970s. If you had missed a movie when it was released in theatres, Ganpati celebrations sometimes gave you another opportunity to see it,” he says. There was no streaming, satellite television or instant access to a vast film library. A neighbourhood screening could therefore become an event in itself, attracting families, children and film enthusiasts from surrounding buildings. “There was a different joy in watching a film with the entire neighbourhood. Ganpati brought everyone together, and cinema became part of that celebration,” Thakur says. It was entertainment, but it was also a form of community movie-going that belonged to a particular period in Mumbai’s cultural history. Stars Power As the film industry changed, so did the visibility of its Ganesh celebrations. Home Ganpatis hosted by stars increasingly attracted media attention. Madhuri Dixit, Shilpa Shetty, Salman Khan and Sonali Bendre are among the film personalities whose celebrations became familiar to audiences. Thakur also sees the growth of television as an important turning point. As Mumbai’s entertainment industry became broader and more diverse, Ganesh Utsav was embraced by artists from different backgrounds. “Earlier, you saw the tradition particularly among Maharashtrian artists and film workers. Later, as the industry expanded—and especially with the growth of television—artists from many different backgrounds began bringing Ganpati home,” he observes. Television brought cameras into celebrations that once remained largely private. Social media pushed that transformation further, making celebrity Ganpati arrivals, pujas and immersions instantly accessible to fans. Pull of Girgaon Some film personalities, however, have a relationship with the festival that predates stardom. Thakur points to veteran actor Jeetendra and his enduring association with Girgaon, where the actor spent his early years. “Jeetendra has never forgotten his Girgaon connection. On the first day of Ganesh Utsav, he has continued to visit the area and seek Bappa’s blessings. That relationship goes back to his early years,” says Thakur. For him, such connections are significant because they reveal how a festival can link a star back to the neighbourhood and community that existed before fame. “It is not always about publicity. For many artists, there is a personal memory attached to Ganpati—the building they lived in, the mandal they knew or the neighbourhood where people watched their films,” he says. Khetwadi’s Culture Filmmaker Manmohan Desai was similarly surrounded by the sights and sounds of Ganesh Utsav. His association with the Khetwadi-Bhatkar Street neighbourhood placed him close to an area renowned for elaborate public Ganpati celebrations. “Manmohan Desai lived in an area where Ganpati celebrations were everywhere around him. Khetwadi had that energy—the crowds, decorations and huge pandals. He was also a devotee who would visit Lalbaugcha Raja,” Thakur recalls. The scale, colour and crowds of Mumbai’s public celebrations were part of the cultural environment in which filmmakers lived and worked. It was only natural that some of that energy would eventually make its way onto the screen. Silver Screen Hindi cinema has repeatedly turned to Ganesh Utsav for music, drama and spectacle. “Deva Ho Deva Ganpati Deva” from Humse Badhkar Kaun became one of the songs closely identified with Ganesh celebrations, while “Deva Shree Ganesha” from Agneepath gave a later generation a powerful cinematic Ganpati anthem. “Cinema takes from society, and Ganesh Utsav is such a strong part of Mumbai that it naturally entered our films,” says Thakur. Much of the world he remembers has changed. The 16mm projectors no longer routinely turn Mumbai’s lanes into movie theatres. The old studio system has faded, some historic studios have disappeared, and celebrity celebrations now reach audiences instantly through phones. But the larger relationship between Mumbai, movies and Ganpati Bappa has endured. “From Rajkamal and RK Studios to the gallis of Girgaon, Ganpati and cinema have travelled together for generations,” Thakur says. “The way we watch films has changed and the way stars celebrate has changed, but Mumbai’s emotional connection with Ganpati Bappa has not.”

Jadunath Sarkar and the Fall of his Empire of Truth

Writer: Shoumojit Banerjee
Shoumojit Banerjee
Jul 24, 2025
6 min read

Inconvenient Truths – the NCERT Textbook Row


India’s schoolbooks are finally lifting the veil on a past too long buried in euphemism and ideological amnesia. Our four-part series examines the roots of India’s textbook wars and the historiographical battles that have resulted in this distortion.


Part 4


Consigned to oblivion in Nehruvian India, Sarkar’s monumental works demand to be read by anyone seriously wishing to understand early Modern India and its enduring problems.

Last week, the controversy over NCERT’s textbook revisions prompted the liberal American historian Richard Eaton to enter the fray. In a long essay for a prominent digital platform, Eaton railed against the Indian government’s war on the Mughal Empire.


At one point, Eaton invoked Sir Jadunath Sarkar’s monumental five-volume study of Aurangzeb (1912-24), calling it “a work so authoritative, so exhaustively researched, that for nearly a century after its publication, no historian dared attempt another comprehensive account of the emperor’s reign.” And yet, Eaton suggested that Sarkar’s portrayal grew darker with each volume - not only of Aurangzeb, but of Muslims more broadly. “Perhaps more than any other factor,” Eaton wrote while asserting that it was Sarkar’s “negative assessment” of Aurangzeb that had shaped how millions have thought about that emperor’s place in Indian history.


Well, Eaton, along with Audrey Truschke - the most outrageous of Aurangzeb revisionists - and their Indian admirers in the chic Left, are pygmies peering at a mountain.


They lack Sarkar’s patrician integrity, his mastery of classical Persian and Sanskrit, Portuguese, French, Marathi and Dingal, his unrelenting archival stamina and his Olympian scholarly discipline.  In Sarkar, India has produced a historian worthy of standing beside the great chroniclers of empire on par with Gibbon, Ranke and Mommsen. To sneeringly dub him the “high-priest of communalism” is not just incorrect but an act of moral cowardice.


Unlike their critics, comfortably ensconced in varsities with easy access to archives, early Indian historians like Sarkar and V.K. Rajwade had to laboriously hunt down documents - firmans, state papers, family archives – to write our history from scratch.


His devoted friend G.S. Sardesai notes in his tribute to Sarkar in ‘Life and Letters of Jadunath Sarkar’ (1957, ed. by Hari Ram Gupta) Sarkar travelled frugally, in third class, armed with little more than a light kit and a bundle of large-scale survey maps. He shunned comfort and resisted the burdens of hospitality. On foot, he crossed miles of rough terrain, climbing steep hills with the tenacity of a soldier.


One such arduous journey took him to the ancestral home of the Jedhe family - custodians of the invaluable Jedhe Chronology, a primary source for early Maratha history. That visit, like many others, helped him identify long-forgotten sites and settle scholarly disputes.


In every sense, Sarkar earned his knowledge the hard way - on foot, in dust and with maps rather than dogma. This was a man who could reproduce Tukaram and Kabir, Kalidas and Rabindranath, Shakespeare, Hali and Hafiz in the same breath.


That Dipesh Chakrabarty, a doyen of the Marxist-subaltern school, chose to devote a major study to Sarkar titled ‘Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and his Empire of Truth’ (2015) is proof that his towering stature is too great to be ignored.


No Hindu since the days of Ishwardas Nagar and Bhimsen Burhanpuri in Aurangzeb’s own time had dared to write an original study of the Mughal emperor. Sarkar saw the scale of the task and rose to meet it with characteristically methodical zeal. He began Persian from scratch and worked through manuscripts by hand. The result was ‘India of Aurangzib: Its Topography, Statistics and Roads’ (1901), based entirely on original sources, which stunned contemporaries with its precision.


Even Maulana Shibli, a titan of Islamic learning, despite his disagreements with Sarkar, acknowledged the integrity of his effort and aided him in locating rare manuscripts like the Haft Anjuman. In order to prepare for his monumental endeavour on Aurangzeb, Sarkar’s instinct was clear: to understand a Muslim ruler, one must understand Islam not merely as faith, but as historical force. He therefore immersed himself in Islamic history outside India, recognising that Aurangzeb was less an individual than an embodiment of an enduring ideology.  


Sarkar’s ‘History of Aurangzib’ - five volumes of majestic scholarship transpired amid communal tempests and political upheaval. The third volume (1916) unsettled Hindus and Muslims alike for opposing reasons. The chapters on Jaziya and temple destruction were explosive for Muslims. Yet, Sarkar’s tone remained judicial. Like a Supreme Court judge, Sarkar laid out the evidence, pointed to the verdict and left it to the conscience of the jury of posterity. He wrote neither for nationalist applause nor colonial validation.


When attacked for omitting Aurangzeb’s Banaras Firman that detailed a land grant to a temple, Sarkar’s rebuttal, devastating in its simplicity, showed it was a tactical gesture issued during Aurangzeb’s military rivalry with Shah Shuja and not an expression of ecumenism.


His facts, once marshalled, left little room for ideological rescue acts.


His ‘Shivaji and His Times’ (1919) sent a different kind of tremor through Maharashtra. Sarkar, stepping into terrain long claimed by regional romanticists, declined to play to the gallery. His Shivaji was not a saint, but a statesman. Sarkar coolly observed that Shivaji failed to forge an enduring state, and that the Marathas never achieved nationhood under the Peshwas —a fact that continues to enrage chauvinists.


Sarkar’s admiration for the Marathas was rooted in a deep appreciation of their historical resilience and republican spirit. “There is a wonderful diffused sense of democratic equality and self-respect among the Marathas,” he once wrote, “which can make them the best nationals of Free India.” Elsewhere, he observed: “They alone among the Hindus had beaten back the tide of Muslim conquest and defended the independence of their country against all the resources of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb. The Marathas have a historic advantage of unique importance in the India of today.”


However, Sardesai observed an “imbecile jealousy and resentment at this inroad into the Maratha preserve by a bold Northerner (Sarkar).” This jealously continues to animate his critics even today, be they Marxist and left-liberal academics with scant command of Persian or regional chauvinists nursing wounded pride.


Sarkar was self-critical to a degree seldom observed in historians. He kept revising his chronology of Shivaji’s escape from Agra well into old age.


After ‘Aurangzib’, Sarkar spent the next 25 years on an even more ambitious task, writing the stunning ‘Fall of the Mughal Empire’ (1932–1950) in four volumes which charted not only the collapse of Mughal Empire but also the rise and fall of the Maratha dominion and the emergence of a third empire - British India.


His verdict was scathing: “The Mughal Empire and with it the Maratha overlordship of Hindustan fell because of the rottenness at the core of Indian society… corruption, inefficiency, and treachery disgraced all branches of the public service.”


Till the end, Sarkar remained a stern judge of men and epochs. He called Shivaji “the last constructive genius of the Hindu race,” but did not flinch from documenting the Maratha depredations of Bengal in the 1740s. He further irked the Poona historians by not echoing Maharashtra’s lament over the Panipat calamity. Instead, Ahmad Shah Abdali and Najib-ud-Daula earned his respect for their tactical brilliance and strategic clarity in the Maratha-Afghan clash.


Sarkar’s set-pieces in his two opuses are breathtaking in their prose and vividness. Whether describing the desperate charge of the Rathores and Hada Chauhans at Dharmat, Shah Jahan’s parting with Dara Shikoh on the eve of Samugarh, the long Maratha-Mughal War, the psychological tension of Rajputana in turmoil in the 1740s or the cataclysmic Third Battle of Panipat in 1761 – they unfold with a cinematic intensity unmatched in Indian historiography.


No historian before or since has written prose with such grandeur, precision and tragic beauty.


Consigned to oblivion in Nehruvian India, Sarkar’s scholarship, which pandered to no one, became politically inconvenient. While the West reveres Edward Gibbon as a monument of historical style, India has failed to honour Sarkar with even basic institutional recognition.


This must change. Sarkar needs to be read in order restore a standard of historical writing that refuses to dilute complexity for convenience.


In his dialogue De Oratore (On the Orator), Cicero, writing in 55 BC said: “History is the witness of the times, the light of truth, the life of memory, the teacher of life, the messenger of antiquity.”


Jadunath Sarkar embodied that credo. India must now live up to it.

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